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

New business cards, including the latest Uke Fest info, arrived this month. We have 1000 of them, so pick them up at The Minstrel or request some from Paul.

Some changes in the website email distribution list were made. publicity@folkproject.org now goes only to Paul and Nancy. publicitycomm@folkproject.org (not on website) goes to the entire Publicity Committee. This keeps down the volume of emails going to all committee members.

We have been supporting publicity efforts by a number of artists and their staff, including Dirdy Birdies, Joe Crookston and April Verch.

Changes in the way some of our outlets work forced the beginning of a discussion on joining njarts.net, which at our level of sales would result in a $100 annual dues. Mike A., Mike D., Nancy and Pat Brangs all gave input or followed up with more information. Given that this equates to less than one Minstrel or Tern ticket per month, I believe that it makes sense to join.

Pam Robinson suggested having a table at Meet Me in Morristown the last Thursday in May, June, July and August (cost to us is $20 per month). Inviting members to come and play as a way of gathering publicity for The Folk Project (rather than just an informational table) was suggested. Both Gloria Fisher and Nancy Kelner had talked about this last year and Paul agrees that it would be a good idea to have it as a shared activity with Community Outreach (as does Pat). Pam has offered to organize it for May and August but will be away during June and July, so we need to draft a champion for this effort, at least for those two months. I have asked Pam for a paragraph on how it went which I will add to this report if it comes in time. Too often we have new people that are long term Morristown residents show up at The Minstrel and tell us that they never knew we were around.

Keep the great ideas coming!

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

Webmaster Report – John Lamb

Thanks to stong efforts by Fil and Lori, in conjunction with the work that Pam has been doing, the web presentations for the Uke Fest and for Special Concerts have improved quite a bit. FiL's experience with web design is particularly apparent on the excellent new Uke Fest page, and here's hoping we can get him to spread some of it to other parts of the site.

We updated the home page carousel to feature the Uke Fest and the next two upcoming Special Concerts. Getaway will be added to the carousel once their part of the site has been updated and their next registration date approaches.

As promised, the Winter and Summer weekends were removed from the main menus. We are still working on updates to the Performer Directory page and adding a Volunteer item to the main menu. We have decided that this item will replace the current menu item labelled Community. Community has four sub-items that already appear elsewhere in the menu structure (Minstrel, Getaway, Swingin' Tern, Evenings of Music) plus a fifth item (Volunteers) that will be promoted to a top-level menu item with its own sub-items.

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

User sessions - 3537 for an average of 114.1 per day representing a 14% increase over April. Fewest (69) on May 15, most (176) on May 28.

Total number of unique Users - 2486, a 20% increase over April. Returning users accounted for 40.2% of all sessions.

Total page views - 8098, up 16% over April, for an average of 2.3 pages per session

Average session duration - 1 minute 45 seconds

I believe a lot of the additional traffic was due to people looking for Getaway information, so expect numbers to be back down closer to normal next month.

Google AdWords traffic accounted for 220 sessions, or 6.2% of the total.

Notable numbers of references to us from other sites included njfamily.com (91 sessions), bandsintown.com (54) and the Folk Project facebook page (52).

We reached users in 48 countries on 6 continents.

Our most frequently visited pages are the home page (2096 pageviews), the Minstrel calendar page (1343) and the Getaway main page (714). The following also got at least 100 page views for the month: the Swingin' Tern page, the Uke Fest page, the newsletter download page, the About Getaway page, the Getaway Program page, the Special Concerts main page, the Getaway Site page and the Getaway Performers 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

FaceBook Page - getting close to 1400 likes.

Pictures from Summer Songs and the Getaway created nice spikes in how many people saw our posts or went to the page.

FaceBook Group -

Almost 400 strong.

Some nice discussions came up in the past month. It has been nice to see other members posting and responding to posts. Keep it going.

Twitter Report – Jean Scully

Pending.

Merchandising – Margaret Crowl

I have nothing in particular to report except to thank Carol Titus & helpers for handling merchandise sales at Getaway, and also Pat Brangs for schlepping the stuff to Getaway and back.

The bumper stickers they thought were defective are not. There is a protective layer on top which needs to be carefully peeled off after the sticker is applied. I will make up a sample with directions for subsequent events when they are on sale.

Publicity Happenings

Online

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

In Print

• Vicinity magazine and other outlets usually have our listings.

• The Star Ledger often lists our events.

Paul Fisher