Publicity

Publicity Report For the November 2, 2021 Board Meeting

November 1, 2021

Publicity Committee Members

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

Web Team Members

John Lamb, Allan Kugel, Charles Lamb, Lori Falco, Rick Thomas (emeritus Member)

Reports

Acting Chairperson’s Report – Sam Edelston

Three weeks ago, I had no idea I’d be doing this, but I’m happy to be here and looking forward to publicizing an organization I’ve been a proud member of since the mid-‘70s.

I’m still in the onboarding phase. I’ll have much more for my portion of the report next month, but I want to give special thanks and a personal standing ovation to Paul and John for helping me get oriented and set up. Others on the Publicity Team and some of the Folk Project’s “venues” have provided helpful information, too, in conversations or emails. I won’t list everyone now, since there probably will have been more by Tuesday evening.

Now that we’re having live events again, Pat Brangs is resuming entering our events on relevant websites.

The subheads below were taken from an old Publicity Report, so if I missed anyone, I’ll get it right next time.

E-communications – Mark Schaffer

Mark and I had a great initial conversation about the Folk Project’s e-communications.

Facebook – Kathi Caccavale

Kathi sent me a detailed rundown on everything she does.

Twitter, Instagram – Jean Scully

YouTube – Joe Guzzo

YouTube Channel Report for the month ending October 30, 2021

1. We have 262 subscribers as of the end of October. That’s a gain of 3 subscribers in the last month. Despite the lack of new programming, our subscriber growth has been steady.

2. This month, the channel got 90.

3. Watch time was 4.9 hours.

4. I am still working on a “Holiday” themed show for December and need more submissions from past guests, members, and anyone who wishes to contribute something.

5. Besides emails and newsletters, we are not getting any referrals from our other publicity areas. I am convinced that we could use Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram more effectively.

6. A recent email suggested viewing some of our past shows, and there was a spike in viewing. We should continue to promote FPTV across all our platforms and venues.

Web – John Lamb

October has been about an average month for the web team, with routine maintenance responsible for most of the effort. We linked to a new Troubadour volunteer job description file provided by Amy Livingston. We renewed the domain registration for swingintern.org for two years. We updated our list of board members for the Swingin' Tern Chair (who stepped down for a couple of days, then reconsidered and decided to serve out the rest of this year) and for our new Publicity Chair. Speaking of our new Publicity Chair, we helped bring Sam Edelston up to speed on issues related to the website. We assisted Mark Schaffer in entering several new events for Streaming Tuesdays. We helped Mike Agranoff add a special message to the upcoming Troubadour event for which Pat Wictor replaced Bill Staines as the featured act. We updated the Contact page to reflect our new US Mail address at MUUF. We assisted Chris Riemer with his Back Office Wiki modifications. We helped Ralph Litwin correct some entries in the Horses Sing None of It broadcast schedule. We rebuilt a Troubadour event that would not accept changes because its database entry had somehow gotten corrupted. We have not figured out how or why the corruption occurred, but it is the first such event in months of using this database and it was very easily diagnosed and fixed.

Due to the board meeting occurring on the second day of the month, this report was submitted to the Publicity Chair before our statistics from October were available. Consequently, our next report will contain statistics for both October and November.

We can still use another team member or two going forward, particularly one with WordPress experience. If you hear of anyone interested in helping out with the website, send them our way. We will gladly train.

As always, many thanks to Charles, Liz, Lori and Allan. Please send questions, comments and suggestions to webmaster@folkproject.org.

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

1. User sessions - 3049 for an average of 98.4 per day representing a decrease of 1.0% over the previous report. Fewest (48) on Oct. 24, most (149) on Oct. 29.

2. Total number of unique users - 2234, a decrease of 0.9% over the previous report.

3. Returning users accounted for 15.9% of all sessions.

4. Total page views 4974 down 2.4% over the previous report for an average of 1.6 pages per session.

5. Average session duration - 1 minute 18 seconds. This is up by 5.6% over the previous month.

6. Notable number of references to us from other sites: christinelavin.com (10)

7. We reached users in 45 countries on 6 continents.

8. Our most frequently visited pages were the home page (1447 pageviews), the Troubadour Calendar page (443) and the eNewsletter Download page (173). The only other page receiving at least 100 pageviews was the Streaming Tuesdays calendar page.

[Sam adds this update: John is setting me up to look at our website results in Google Analytics, since I’m familiar with that platform.]

Merch – Paul Fisher (acting)