Newsletter

Newsletter Committee Report 2021-010

Things are proceeding as usual with the invaluable help of Kathi Caccavale, Pat Brangs, Liz Pagan, Bill Henderson, and Gary Pratt.

The standalone Streaming Tuesdays flyer is now being prepared monthly and is being sent out to the usual publicity channels, including the literature table at the Troubadour. Hopefully, this will advertise these streaming shows more widely outside our membership.

There was an unfortunate hiccup in the preparation of the November newsletter that resulted in an article that Mike had submitted being mistakenly omitted from the issue. The article was an appeal to the membership to return to the Troubadour now that it had resumed its in-person shows. The article will appear in the January newsletter instead as part of the next publicity push.

This triggered a conversation about how effective the newsletter was in getting announcements out to the FP membership, particularly via the enewsletters announced through Constant Contact. Mike asked Mark Schaffer for some information about how many email announcements were sent out and opened for the most recent newsletter, and how many resulted in newsletters being downloaded. This in turn led Mike to ask me for similar information going back to before the Covid pandemic, comparing how we are doing now with two years ago.

Attached to this report is the information I assembled mostly from Constant Contact, presented both in graph form and as a spreadsheet of the raw data. The labels are pretty obvious, but here are some comments about how to interpret the numbers.

1) The top blue line shows the number of newsletter announcement emails sent out via Constant Contact. The line is mostly increasing and is above the membership line because once someone has signed up for getting email announcements, they are not automatically removed. However, they can remove themselves if they want. Please note that the number of emails opened each month tracks reasonably closely to the active membership count.

2) The WHO declared Covid-19 a pandemic in March, 2020. Note that membership numbers began declining from this date.

3) We do not really know from the Constant Contact numbers how many people download newsletters. The graphs only show how many people click on the link in the email to get to the newsletter download page, not whether they click on that page to download a newsletter. Also, the link to the download page almost never changes and is not password protected, so anyone who learns the link can bookmark it and either a) click on it as soon as they see the email arrive with the announcement subject line, or b) just click on it randomly after the 20th of the month until they see the new issue in the download menu. Then they could click to download a newsletter without it being recorded by Constant Contact.

4) From some preliminary website numbers reported by John Lamb, it appears that the actual number of members who visit the newsletter download page is over three times the number reported by Constant Contact. I intend to follow up on these numbers to get a more accurate count.

All things considered, it appears that the enewsletter is reasonably effective in getting the word out to the membership about Folk Project activities. Yes, we are down somewhat in readership from where we were two years ago, but as a percentage of membership we appear to be ahead of where we were previously.

George Otto

Folk Project Newsletter Editor

newsletter@folkproject.org