E Comm Annual Report

Electronic Communications Committee

Annual Report – December 1, 2015

Electronic Communications keeps moving along. We now have 4105 contacts, an increase of an even 500 over last year’s number of 3605. Our open rate for the past three months is 26.0%, about the same as last year, when we were at 25.9%. Our click rate is 11.9%, which is down somewhat from 13.4% last year, but still a very good rate. Over the past three months, we sent out 32,199 individual emails.

I normally provide figures for the number of e-mail contacts for each of our venues, but unfortunately this year I will have to provide those at a later date. I just discovered that a few months ago we had a problem with an upload of one of our email lists and that list was accidentally added to all of our email lists. This means that all of our lists have people on them who may not want to be there and their numbers are artificially inflated.

It will take some time to fix this, but I’ll be working on it over the next few weeks and hope to have everything back to normal by our January meeting. At that time, I’ll give you the contact numbers for each of our venue lists.

We continue to send out regular emails from each of our venues as well as e-newsletter notifications, membership renewals, flyers and volunteer requests. This year, we also sent out notices about our Morris Arts award. And for the first time, we sent an invitation to participate in the Birthday show to our entire membership. This proved very successful in enticing people who had never signed up before to join in. We decided to repeat this process with the Halloween show and the invitation to perform was very well received, with a 40% open rate and many people signing up as a result.

We made good use of EventSpot, which is Constant Contact’s facility for registering events. In addition to the Getaway, we used it to keep track of ticket sales for the Paxton concert and the Uke Fest. We also conducted surveys about the Getaway and the newsletter.

As an experiment, we took advantage of a coupon from Constant Contact to run a Facebook ad. The email we promoted was a generic email with all of our upcoming events. The results from the Facebook ad were somewhat mixed and Facebook ads may prove to be too expensive for the results they yield for us. But the generic email was very well received and it would probably be worthwhile for us to send out more emails of this type periodically.

In 2015 the Folk Project was once again named a Constant Contact All Star. In their notification, Constant Contact told us, “Every year, the bar to All Star status gets higher and higher. Only 10% of Constant Contact customers receive it. But 65% of All Stars, like yourself, are multiple-year recipients. We're proud that more and more customers have unlocked the success formula to building better relationships with their audience!”

As always, I want to thank my team of Barbara Moo, Liz Pagan and Bobbie Rosengarten for their help. And I want to commend all of you who are using electronic communications for always thinking outside the box and finding new ways to make use of our communications tools to help us achieve our goals.

Respectfully submitted,

Lori Falco