PUBLICITY

Publicity Committee Report

2 March 2014

Publicity Committee members: Alicia Weimer, Jeff Saxton, Jim Gartner, Jim King, Joanne Cronin, John Lamb, Michael Mitsch, Nancy Kelner, Pam Robinson, Pat Brangs, Paul Fisher, Loretta Brooks and Cathy Ballard

Webmaster Report – John Lamb

It has been a short but snowy and very busy month for the web team, requiring more than the usual number of Special Alert messages. Among other things, we have made a couple of name changes to reflect Festival becoming the Acoustic Getaway, and some Evenings of Music becoming Home Made Music. We have integrated the Home Made Music events into our database for automatic inclusion on the home page. The usual pages for the Getaway were prepared in anticipation of the start of registration on March 1. We debuted a new part of the home page, just underneath the Swingin' Tern section, dedicated to the Zed Music Series. This required minor adjustments to other elements on the home page. A small notice was put on the home page for the Winter Weekend and the summer/winter weekend page was updated. Some of this required behind-the-scenes enhancements to the tools that we use to keep the site updated. We investigated and hopefully fixed some issues with email forwarding that resulted in bounced email to some addresses on the fullboard list. We detected and investigated some performance issues related to a bottleneck in ip identification, and also updated the GeoIP access location tables.

We continue to follow up with security measures in response to last August's break in attempt by monitoring log files to detect any new suspicious activity. One unsuccessful attempt was identified and reported to the company that hosts the IP address from which the attempt came. A potential security problem in our database was identified and fixed.

We have been working on improving site documentation by producing documentation describing the site as it exists and by starting to use an issue tracking system that allows us to better keep track of identified problems and improvements that we know we want to make. We initially had some problems with logging in on the tracking system (Mantis) but believe that those have been resolved.

There is also a lot of work in progress that will be rolled out in the weeks and months to come. The new membership form and policies will soon be up. A survey of smartphone and tablet users is ongoing from which we hope to gain data to use in developing a small screen version of the site. Recognizing that several events over the next few months will want their fair share of the home page real estate, we are looking at carousel programs that allow time sharing of the available space among more events than we would otherwise have room for. We are also looking into integrating the Zed Music Series into our database for automated inclusion on the home page, and into the RSS feed that produces a calendar of all Folk Project events.

As always, a tip of the hat to hard-working team members Allan Kugel, Charles Lamb and Lori Falco. Please send questions, suggestions and comments to webmaster@folkproject.org.

Facebook Report – Pam Robinson

The FP is doing well with over 900 likes.

Pictures get the most views. Our pics of the recent Valentines Day show have been seen by over 1600 people. Keep those pictures coming.

Chairman’s Report – Paul Fisher

Things have been slowly improving as Paul figures out how to plan for the monthly work. Releases went out on time this month. The learning curve is still relatively steep.

Nancy continues to be very helpful with ideas, suggestions and reminders.

Other news:

· A request has been sent to consider routing “publicity@folkproject.org” to only the chair and a reduced number of people so that everyone on the committee does not get all of the emails. A separate internal email (publicitycommittee?) would cover the wider distribution.

· Paul will try to attend the next Jersey Arts meeting with Nancy to meet the people she has been working with. Meetings are quarterly.

· Nancy has been working on the new business cards and will soon have a full mock-up for consideration. 500 of the old cards were located and delivered to The Minstrel.

· The Folk Project belongs to the Morris County Tourism Bureau and has received a box of the booklets where we are listed and have an advertisement. About 10 were left with the literature table at The Minstrel. More are available for reference or promotional use. The annual bill has been submitted to the treasurer for payment.

· The New York Pinewoods Folk Music Club has been sending a complementary newsletter subscription to the Folk Project for some some. It was being sent to Carl Croce but now is returned as undeliverable. We need to select to whom this should be routed.

Online

· Morristown Green has posted a very nice article on the Valentine's Day show (thanks Lori!).

http://morristowngreen.com/2014/02/17/video-bruuuce-the-bossys-bovine-valentine-from-the-minstrel/

· NJ Family chose the Valentines's Day shows as a recommended special activity: http://www.njfamily.com/NJ-Family/February-2012/Sweet-Celebrations-for-Valentines-Day/?utm_source=Eletter+Feb.+5%2C+2014+FINAL&utm_campaign=FINAL+Eletter+Feb.+5%2C+2014&utm_medium=email

In Print

· The Morris County Tourism Bureau booklet mentioned above.

Working with Performers and Their Publicists

On the Radio

· There is an ongoing discussion on connecting Minstrel performers with local radio stations and how to most effectively provide promotional CDs.

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Other Items

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SHORT UPDATE FROM PAUL DATED MARCH 3, 2014:

Hi All,

I just did my Monday night check of the Daily Record and see that BIll Nutt did a very nice write-up on Lil Rev last Wednesday.

http://www.dailyrecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2014302280006

Paul