Publicity

YouTube Channel Report

• We have 258 subscribers as of the end of August. That’s a gain of 8 subscribers in the last month.

• This month, the channel got 183 views, which is up by a fair amount.

• Watch time was 27.1 hours, which is almost double from last month.

• I had interviews with three guest stars during the month. The three programs got a total of 128 views.

• I am considering putting a “Holiday” themed show for December and will be asking for submissions from past guests, members, and anyone else who wishes to contribute something.

• I encourage the Board to watch this month’s shows. We may want to engage the upcoming artists in other FP venues.

• As is easily seen by the numbers, new interviews and music has increased viewership significantly. If you have booking companies and agents to share, please do so. I will reach out to them for more guests.

Respectfully submitted,

Joseph Guzzo

Webmaster's Report

Having launched the new site at the end of July, we were poised to handle the inevitable glitches and typos that arise on a project of this size. To our relief, there were fewer of those than we feared there might be. In the course of August, we made numerous minor tweaks to the home page, and the pages for Troubadour, Open Stage, Swingin' Tern and Streaming Tuesdays. Statistics included below indicate that website use held fairly steady over July and increased substantially in August in large part due to Uke Fest and the very nice publicity that it generated.

We started to show the heads of various committees and venues how to enter their own data on the new site, starting off with the two simplest data entry jobs - getting out the monthly newsletter and entering the broadcast schedule for Horses Sing None of It. We ran into a minor problem with the newsletter in that the process of editing the newsletter download page works on my computer (a PC) but not so well on George Otto's Mac. George can upload the newsletter files, but cannot make two very minor changes that add the current month's files to the list of what can be downloaded by the user of that page. It takes all of about a minute to do that minor edit, so I will be handling it until I can figure out why the edit is not working for George. Ralph is entering broadcast dates on his own and the next step will be to show him how to enter information about new show tapings once HSNOI resumes recording episodes.

Lori pitched in with some work on the Performers Resource Directory, which we hope will come online in the course of September. Allan weighed in with some advice for the upcoming history pages and a method that he has used successfully for resizing and cropping photos.

Not directly related to the website, but I also assisted Mike Agranoff with some Excel Spreadsheets - one that takes online sales data and produces reports needed at by the person at the door for Troubadour concerts, and one that helps him follow the money trail before and during each week's show.

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

Last month's report had to be filed before the July numbers were available, so here are the data for both July and August.

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

User sessions - 2746 for an average of 88.6 per day representing no change over the previous report. Fewest (24) on July 25, most (136) on July 19.

Total number of unique users - 1955, an increase of 13.5% over the previous report.

Returning users accounted for 19.9% of all sessions.

Total page views 4870 down 3.3% over the previous report for an average of 1.8 pages per session.

Average session duration - 1 minute 21 seconds. This is down by 19.9% over the previous month.

Notable number of references to us from other sites: morristowngreen.com (24)

We reached users in 39 countries on 6 continents.

Our most frequently visited pages were the home page (1474 pageviews), the Uke Fest page (312) and the Swingin' Tern page (255). Other pages receiving at least 100 pageviews were the Full Calendar page, the newsletter Download page, and the Troubadour calendar page.

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

User sessions - 3249 for an average of 104.8 per day representing an increase of 18.3% over the previous report. Fewest (44) on both August 7 and 8, most (218) on August 21.

Total number of unique users - 2348, an increase of 20.1% over the previous report.

Returning users accounted for 17.2% of all sessions.

Total page views 5449 up 11.9% over the previous report for an average of 1.7 pages per session.

Average session duration - 1 minute 25 seconds. This is up by 4.6% over the previous month.

Notable number of references to us from other sites: morristowngreen.com (135, likely due to their story about Uke Fest), forum.ukuleleunderground.com (29)

We reached users in 41 countries on 6 continents.

Our most frequently visited pages were the home page (1662 pageviews), the Uke Fest page (798) and the Troubadour Calendar page (460). The only other page receiving at least 100 pageviews was the newsletter Download page.

E-Communications Sub-Committee

General:

The Music Alert continues to be sent out twice a week.

Paul Fisher is now on the proofreading team, much to our glee.

Format Improvements Continue:

The Music Alert’s basic approach is two featured articles per email,

followed by constant, shorter reminder articles to keep upcoming events in people’s minds.

The green sidebar is still a calendar of music events with links to event pages.

The bottom section, originally just sales, is now “Click to Admit.”

The intent was originally to offer direct links to purchase tickets,

but it now includes direct links to attend online and free events..

The links are grouped by venue/program.

Metrics Disappear in September:

As mentioned last month,

new Apple security measures will make it impossible for Constant Contact

to collect the standard metrics we’ve reported in the monthly board reports over the past decades.

Metrics End on a Himalayan High:

Our Open Rate was 20% before the pandemic, a high rate.

We maintained 20% during the pandemic despite no live audience events

by creating interesting articles to read.

(Special thanks to Roger Dietz for the RagTag series.)

We anticipated an increased readership as the live Troubadour opened

and people only interested in live participation were added to our readership.

The final August email increased to a whopping 24% Open Rate.

Unfortunately, this will be our only indication of increase readership

before the new Apple security measures make metric comparisons useful.

The E-Communiciations Team is relentless, effective, passionate, and overworked.

High praise that they earn twice weekly.

Mark Schaffer

Sub-Chair