Publicity

Publicity Committee Report To The January 2021 Board Meeting

January 4, 2021

Publicity Committee Members

Alicia Weimer, Deborah Graham, George Otto, Howard Goldman, Jean Scully, Jill Lagerstrom, Jim Gartner, Joanne Cronin, Joe Guzzo, John Lamb, Kathi Caccavale, Liz Pagan, Loretta Brooks, Lori Falco, Michael Mitsch, Mike Rauchwerk, Pat Brangs, Paul Fisher, Rebecca Rydell, Susan Lembo,

Nancy Beyer and publicitychair@folkproject.org.

Chairperson’s Report – Nancy Beyer and Paul Fisher

Paul and Nancy had a hard time coordinating the handover, so Paul is writing this report, which covers December anyway.

The biggest thing to report is that the handover is behind schedule but ramping up as of today.

E-Comm, the Web Team, Facebook and YouTube have continued to be busy. Thank you all!

Many thanks to those who have continued to prepare documents, make posts of our events, and email on behalf of Folk Project Publicity.

Subcommittee Reports

Merchandise Acting Chair – Paul Fisher.

We still need a merch owner, to keep track of our small inventory and maybe organize a new t-shirt design.

Webmaster – John Lamb

December was an average month involving the usual end-of-year maintenance of email accounts and forwarders to reflect the leadership changes that result from our annual elections. Most of the effort went into keeping the Stayaway site updated as new shows were booked.

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

User sessions - 1728 for an average of 55.7 per day representing a 14.9% decrease over the previous report. Fewest (16) on Dec 25, most (98) on Dec 21.

Total number of unique users - 1177, a decrease of 4.9% over the previous report.

Returning users accounted for 22.5% of all sessions.

Total page views 2966, down 8.4% over the previous report for an average of 1.7 pages per session.

Average session duration - 1 minute 22 seconds. This is up by 9.5% over the previous month.

Notable number of references to us from other sites: antjeduvekot.com (16)

We reached users in 33 countries on 5 continents (no users in Africa this month).

Our most frequently visited pages were the home page (1088 pageviews), the Newsletter download page (202) and the event page for the Happy Zoom Year party (109). The following also got at least 100 page views for the month: the Troubadour page.

As always, thanks to the team of Allan, Charles, Lori and Liz. Please keep those questions, comments and suggestions coming to webmaster@folkproject.org

Electronic Communications – Mark Schaffer

In the past 30 days the Project sent 41,164 emails

8,638 emails were opened.

75% of our opens were on desktops.

For the year 2020 the Project sent 505,973 emails.

124,298 emails were opened.

71% of our opens were on desktops.

For comparison,

for the year 2019 the Project sent 267,601 emails.

75,111 were opened.

64% were on desktops. This is pre-COVID, so people were more mobile.

This week we retired The RagTag essays in the event emails after 70 essays in the series.

Much thanks to Roger Deitz for the series.

The essays enhanced our event emails with the purpose of increasing our opens.

In closing, Roger offered free downloads (donation optional) of his entire RagTag Book,

which contains the essays that the Folk Project distributed in these event emails.

Social Media Coordinator – Vacant

Nothing to report.

Facebook – Kathi Caccavale

Although the increase in volume has slowed recently, we continue to see more likes on our FP FB page and more members request in the Folk Project group, which I ascribe to our virtual concert activity. When someone likes a concert event posting, I invite them to like the FB Folk Project page.

Gary Pratt and I continue to work with performers to coordinate the bi-weekly Stayaway live stream events, now almost exclusively from our Facebook page. We do a live stream test before every concert, to minimize technical difficulties during the performances, but sometimes Father Internet and Mother Earth combine to interrupt a live broadcast despite our pre-vetting, due to circumstances beyond our control.

As of January 3:

Folk Project Page:

3,281 people like this (up from 2,203 on 2/1/2020)

3,843 people follow this

Folk Project Group:

1,036 members (up from 610 on 2/1/2020)

Swingin' Tern Group:

539 members (up from 528 on 2/1/2020)

NJ Uke Fest Group:

222 members (up from 185 on 2/1/2020)

Twitter – Jean Scully

Pending.

YouTube – Joe Guzzo

We have 226 subscribers as of the end of this month.

That’s a gain of 4 subscribers in the last month.

The channel got 393 views, which is 163 more than usual.

Watch time was 113.7 hours. (73.7 more than usual.)

We had 46 views in the last 48 hours.

Our most-watched shows are those containing new interviews and performances. I could use some additional assistance with making arrangements to get people on the show.

I had performances by Stephen Arout and one by Chrissy Roberts on our December 20th broadcast. I received some positive comments about this holiday-themed show.

The chart below shows analytics for the top five videos for the past 28 days. It is evident that we do far better with featuring performers, and it should help with the cross-pollination of other Stayaway events. I would like to have the board consider ways to grow this vehicle of providing entertainment to our members.

One final special request, can someone please do something to avoid us having another sucky year?