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

Report From “The Chair” – Paul Fisher

Our biggest news is that Margaret Crowl has stepped down as Merchandise Chair. Thank you, Margaret for your contributions to reviving that activity.

This leaves us with two immediate problems.

1. We need to find a volunteer to take over Merch.

a) The responsibilities include inventory, re-ordering and leading any effort for new merchandise when appropriate plus arranging for getting the inventory to wherever it will be sold and arranging for storage.

b) Most of our sales efforts are at The Getaway and the work for that falls under Michael Cohen of the Getaway Committee. The Merch chair just needs to arrange for delivery and return of inventory.

c) Other occasional sales efforts sometimes happen at Member Events like Halloween, Valentine’s Day, Summer Songs and the Birthday Show.

2. We urgently need a clean, dry, hopefully heated space for our merchandise, which includes a lot of t-shirts and books but also our latest batch of Folk Project mugs.

Do we have any volunteers or suggestions from the Board?

The Publicity Committee will make an extra effort to get the word out on the new time and price for The Minstrel Concerts.

A friend/member found that her local Recorder paper was posting generic info about The Minstrel that was several years out of date and contacted Mike Agranoff, who contacted the Committee. Nancy recognized that Recorder Newspapers is one of her outlets and is righting the situation.

The Minstrel showed up on WhoFish.com and Mike forwarded the unexpected email confirmation he got to the Committee. Pat Brangs recognized it as a derivative from her northjersey.com listing.

The committee requested a press release for the Lil Rev house concert, which Mark provided and we distributed along with our regular releases.

The Minstrel was entered as one of the finalists for newjerseystage.com’s Best Coffeehouse or Non-Traditional Venue for Live Music. The Chair takes full responsibility for letting this one get away but voting ends Nov 1, so it is not too late! http://www.newjerseystage.com/awards/awards.php?category=music Pam Robinson also shared this info with the Board.

Webmaster Report – John Lamb

Due to the early deadline for reports occasioned by having the board meeting on the first of the month, I am unable to provide a full month's worth of statistics for web access this time around. As of the 28th, everything looked reasonably within expectations. I will provide the actual October numbers in next month's report.

Otherwise, it was a fairly quiet month for the web team. A routine maintenance message from our web host reminded us that we had a lot of subdomains containing outdated items we were no longer using. That amounts to an engraved invitation to anyone attempting to hack into our system, so we deleted everything we thought we did not need. It turns out that some of it actually was being accessed by the live site even though it should not have been. That caused a couple of email-related glitches for a couple of days until Allan chased down the problem and fixed it. We also registered the domain swingintern.org that was previously set up by Joel Remde but which had expired some months after he did. It is now set up once more to forward to the main Swingin Tern page. Other than that, it was mostly routine stuff like updating email addresses, removing the Getaway from the carousel and putting the Lil Rev events in its place, and answering questions about where certain email addresses forwarded. We welcome the news from Special Events that Fil Wisneski intends to start working on their web presence. We are well aware of the quality of his work from the latest Uke Fest. As always, thanks to the team of Allan, Lori, Fil and Charles. Please send any questions, comments or suggestions to webmaster@folkproject.org.

Social Media Coordinator – George Otto

Pending.

Facebook Report – Pam Robinson

Kathi Caccavale has offered to help out with the FPs FB Page and is working on creating an Event for each of the Minstrel Concerts.

The FPs Page had been a bit quiet, and now with Kathi's help things are starting to pick up again.

The FPs Group has been chugging along. I did just send a caution message to one member of the group regarding excessive posting about his business (a recording studio).

Twitter Report – Jean Scully

Pending.

Merchandising – ??

Margaret will have left the job as Merch chair by the time the Board meeting starts.

We are in desperate need of a new champion and a clean, dry place for storing our Merch!

Publicity Happenings Online

• Morristown Green published an article on Sleeping Bee and the Bob Dylan Nobel Prize with video and a great mention of the Getaway.

• Frequent listings, some with very good placement in njarts.org. They email up to 4x per week and some weeks our concerts are listed 3 or more times.

• Listings showed up in WhoFish, which it turns out is fed by northjersey.com.

• Jerseyarts.com listed our Halloween Concert as “a wonderful Halloween party tradition” in their Halloween Guide.

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