Publicity

Publicity Committee members: Alicia Weimer, Deborah Graham, Eileen Napolitano, George Otto, Howard Goldman, Jean Scully, Jim Gartner, Jim King, Joanne Cronin, John Lamb, Loretta Brooks, Margaret Crowl, Michael Mitsch, Nancy Kelner, Olga Alvarez, Pam Robinson, Pat Brangs, Paul Fisher, Susan Lembo

Report From “The Chair” – Paul Fisher

We continue to support publicity efforts by a number of artists and their staff.

We have paid our dues ($100) and joined njarts.net to maintain our access to the outlet.

Publicity has supported the table at Meet Me in Morristown.

Thanks to all of you that make this happen every month!

Webmaster Report – John Lamb

Lori spent a fair amount of time on more completely integrating the website with the Folk Project Constant Contact presence for many of our activities, including Minstrel, Special Concerts and Uke Fest. This will allow for smoother operation between the website and CC, permitting venue chairs who so desire to compose their own pages on Constant Contact. Lori also updated the home page to reflect that we have started selling tickets for the Calan Special Concert.

Changes were made on several pages to reflect the new start times for Minstrel and Open Stage. Additional changes are in the works that will add the start time to Minstrel activities on the home page and the Minstrel Calendar page, because we now have three different possible start times (7:30, 7:45 and 8:00) for Friday events at Minstrel.

Through TechSoup.org, Folk Project has qualified for up to 200 individual licenses to use Microsoft Office 365, an online version of the Office Suite, featuring one Terabyte of online storage per user and the most current versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and a few other programs. These licenses are intended for use by Folk Project member volunteers doing work for Folk Project. This would normally cost $5 per month per user, but we are getting it for free. If you are interested in having an account that will allow you to use Office 365, contact John Lamb (johnlamb@aol.com). Note that we will still be using Google Gmail as our official email provider, even though that could also be handled via Office 365. In general, Google does better with mail and the Office 365 programs are better than the Google apps that perform similar functions. Having both allows us to have the best of both worlds.

Stats from Google AdWords and Analytics for the calendar month of June:

User sessions - 2774 for an average of 92.5 per day representing a 22% decrease over May. Fewest (53) on June 25, most (159) on June 21.

Total number of unique Users - 1949, a 22% decrease over May. Returning users accounted for 41.8% of all sessions.

Total page views - 6974, down 14% over May, for an average of 2.5 pages per session

Average session duration - 2 minute 4 seconds. This is up by 15% over May.

As predicted, a lot of the additional traffic was due to people looking for Getaway information, and our numbers were back to normal last month.

Google AdWords traffic accounted for 120 sessions, or 4.3% of the total.

Notable numbers of references to us from other sites included facebook.com (70 sessions), newjerseybluegrass.org (26) and njfamily.com (26).

We reached users in 48 countries on 6 continents.

Our most frequently visited pages are the home page (1747 pageviews), the Minstrel calendar page (1450) and the Swingin' Tern page (358). The following also got at least 100 page views for the month: the newsletter download page, the main Getaway page, and the Open Stage page.

As always, many thanks to Allan, Lori, Charles and FiL for the work they do. Keep those inquiries and suggestions coming to webmaster@folkproject.org.

Social Media Coordinator – George Otto

Pending.

Facebook Report – Pam Robinson

Pending

Twitter Report – Jean Scully

Pending.

Merchandising – Margaret Crowl

Sales of Folk Project merchandise is planned for the Birthday Show.

Publicity Happenings

Online

• Frequent listings, some with very good placement in njarts.org.

In Print

• Vicinity Magazine opened their calendar section with a half-page photo of Muriel Anderson and some of Special Concert information

• Vicinity magazine and other outlets usually have our listings.

• The Star Ledger often lists our events.

Paul Fisher