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

Most of the groups reporting in through the Publicity Committee have been very busy this month. Read their reports below!

We have had some good publicity through both our regular outlets and some that don’t publish us that often.

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

Webmaster Report – John Lamb

The web team is very pleased to introduce its newest member - FiL Wisneski. FiL is a web designer by trade with 20 years of experience. Initially, he will be handling the Uke Fest page(s) just as Charles Lamb is in charge of the Getaway pages. FiL can be reached at the same email address as the rest of the team, at webmaster@folkproject.org.

We have experienced some difficulties integrating Constant Contact registration with the pages that get generated by our home-brew editor for Special Concerts. Lori Falco is working with Pam Robinson to address Pam's concerns about the appearance of the web presence for the Irish Mythen concert. Many of these have been addressed in an ad hoc manner, and Lori is now working to improve the appearance of pages generated by our editor.

Allan Kugel fixed some issues on the Swingin Tern page that were identified by Doug Heacock.

The link to the volunteer calendar on the Volunteer page was changed. The old link was generating an error message that claimed we had violated Terms of Service for the site that hosts that calendar. We switched to an alternate link to the same page provided by Amy Livingstone and it has been working.

Due to the webmaster being extremely busy with lots of things outside of Folk Project this month, we are backed up on a few items, including updating the Performer Directory page, including job descriptions for key Volunteer positions and removal of references to the Winter and Summer weekends, which seem not to be held anymore. We will try to get to all of these in the course of May.

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

User sessions - 2979 for an average of 99.3 per day. Fewest (52) on April 23, most (174) on April 15.

Total number of unique Users - 2066. Returning users accounted for 40.6% of all sessions.

Total pageviews - 6999, for an average of 2.3 pages per session

Average session duration - 1 minute 47 seconds

Google AdWords traffic accounted for 168 sessions, or 5.6% of the total.

Notable numbers of references to us from other sites included the Folk Project facebook page (61 sessions), newjerseybluegrass.com(32) and visitnj.org(25).

We reached users in 50 countries on 6 continents.

Our most frequently visited pages are the home page (1956 pageviews), the Minstrel calendar page (1537) and the UkeFest page (395). The following also got at least 100 page views for the month: the Swingin' Tern page, the newsletter download page, the main page for Getaway, the Special Concerts main page, and the Minstrel Open Stage page.

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

Social Media Coordinator – George Otto

As you know, Chris has been working to get the FP YouTube channel set up. His latest effort is to get at least 100 subscribers to the channel so that we can get a vanity URL (youtube.com/FolkProject?) for people to use. There is currently a YouTube button on the folkproject.org website that uses the extended URL: www.youtube.com/channel/UCjdbfs4jHHGz--AYidrnfZA . We will announce the short URL when we can claim it.

I have been spending half my time in VA helping my Mother sort through her things and get ready to move to a retirement community. This (along with editing the FP Newsletter) has gotten in the way of getting the FP Twitter and Facebook accounts integrated with our HootSuite account. I plan on getting at least one of these hooked up by the next board meeting in June.

Facebook Report – Pam Robinson

Moving along nicely.

Twitter Report – Jean Scully

No report.

Merchandising – Margaret Crowl

Everything is under control.

Margaret has ordered and received new mugs (green) and a number of copies of Rise Up Singing and Rise Again to be ready for the getaway.

New bumper stickers are also on their way and should be in this week.

Margaret is in touch with Carol about logistics for the Boutique at the Getaway and has offered her help if needed.

Taking inventory of existing T-shirts is next.

Publicity Happenings

Online

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

• Morris County Tourism Bureau gave Summer Songs prominent billing in their April-May listing email.

• Morris County Connections email listed the Jim Hurst concert at The Minstrel.

• Vicinity magazine lists at least all of our concerts and some of our dances.

• The Irish Mythen concert will be listed in the IACI E-news (by now, it may be out).

In Print

• Vicinity magazine and other outlets have our listings.

• The Star Ledger often lists our events.

Paul Fisher