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

I have been to a lot of music events this month and have not spent nearly enough time on Publicity, but I want to thank our team for their dependable efforts! Nancy continues to be a major pillar of the committee and we are seeing more feedback coming from newer members like Olga. Jim King has provided his monthly detailed press release almost every month despite severe health issues and Michael Mitsch get the photos to us to share with our outlets.

A discussion was opened when Jersey Arts requested a link to our ADA (American with Disabilities Act) web page. John Lamb has now added a task to the Web team’s to-do list that will end with us listing ADA info for our regular venues.

Our committee members have been invited to the Volunteer Appreciation event. They do a valuable job every month on our schedule and they do it well!

Jim King is housebound because of his health issues but appreciates getting the Board and Publicity emails to stay in touch with what is going on.

Webmaster Report – John Lamb

September was not a busy month for the web team, mostly involving ongoing maintenance. Allan and Lori worked on coordinating changes to the Minstrelgram tools that were made necessary by the changes to our Constant Contact account. Charles updated the Getaway site to reflect that single day tickets became available for sale. We had the usual tweaks to the email accounts and kept the carousel information up to date.

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

User sessions - 2785 for an average of 92.8 per day representing a 4.9% increase over last month.

Fewest (51) on September 27, most (153) on September 21.

Total number of unique Users - 1964, a 0.8% increase over last month. Returning users accounted

for 42.6% of all sessions.

Total page views - 6063, up 8% over last month, for an average of 2.2 pages per session

Average session duration - 1 minute 34 seconds. This is up by 2% over last month.

As predicted, things picked up in September after a sleepy August, although we are still a little slow overall. I hope we will be back to our usual stats in October.

Google AdWords traffic accounted for 249 sessions, or 8.9% of the total.

Notable numbers of references to us from other sites included our Facebook page (41 sessions)acousticmusic.com, (26 sessions) and uptime.com (24).

We reached users in 45 countries on 6 continents.

Our most frequently visited pages were the home page (1693 pageviews), the Minstrel calendar page (1200) and the Getaway main page (427). The following also got at least 100 page views for the month: the Swingin' Tern page, the newsletter download page, the Getaway About page, the full calendar RSS feed and the Special Concerts 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

The Folk Project's Page and Group are puttering along.

Twitter Report – Jean Scully

Pending.

Merchandising – Margaret Crowl

Margaret has informed us of her intention to step down as Merch chair effective Nov. 1.

Publicity Happenings

Online

• Morristown Green gave great coverage to the Uke Fest.

• 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.

In Print

• Echoes-Sentinel newspaper had a listing for Calan with photo.

• Out & About had one or more listings.

• The Star Ledger published listings for Christine Lavin/Buskins and Toby Walker.