Hi folks,

Nothing new to report.

Lindsey

Community Service Report for July 5, 2022:

Except for passing of Jean Farnworth's Husband, Paul Dellechiaie, on June 15th,

No other news for Community Service this month.

Sincerely,

Evelyn Maurer

FP Community Service

From our northern segment, After their taping with Al Podber, Amherst TV had to move out of their space. Amherst said they are planning to build a new space, but couldn't give any time frame. Northampton never explained what the situation is with their studio. Al Podber will be hosting future shows when scheduled.

I’ve sent two notes to our contact at Mendham TV and haven’t heard anything back. Our plan was to work together to staff tapings and develop a larger volunteer base but without communication I can’t go forward on that front. I have stopped into the studio 3 times since late November and while everything is functional, it doesn’t appear anyone has been in the studio at all.

Hopefully my new email box will circumvent any issues in that department and we’ll get communication again. New date for being up and running is November with or without Mendham volunteers.

Sandie

Membership report.

I'm on vacation this week. I don't have access to a computer so I can't run the numbers. Sorry. This report is being written using voice to text. Good luck trying to read it.

This month working with John Lamb who did most the work we set in place the process for membership to be self-administered via the folk project website. Right now the software is running in a test mode which I will work with for another month to make sure there's no issues before we go live.

This new system will eliminate the need for people to update multiple databases to keep accurate membership data.

People can update their own membership data and correct incorrect entries. The new system will also accept credit card payments for membership.

I will update the board next month with a progress report.

Thank you John Lamb for all your hard work.

Thank you John Lamb for all your hard work.

Yes, I intentionally said that twice because I meant it that much.

Submitted,

Todd Dennison

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

There was an error in the July newsletter with the date of the Evening of Music at Mark and Robin Schaffer's house being mistakenly announced to take place on July 11 when it should have been July 9. The mistake was quickly fixed in the electronic version of the newsletter but unfortunately survived in the paper version.

An email alerting the membership to the error will be sent prior to July 9.

Thanks,

George Otto

Folk Project Newsletter Editor

newsletter@folkproject.org

Publicity Report for the July 5, 2022 Board Meeting

Sam Edelston, July 1, 2022

Publicity Committee Members

Alicia Weimer, George Otto, Howard Goldman, Jean Scully, 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

Reports

Chairperson’s Report – Sam Edelston

Personally, I had a busy June and couldn’t focus as much attention on FP business as I’d have liked. July will be easier, and August easier still.

Our statistics for June were generally down compared to other months. The only well-known, nationally touring featured act in the June Troubadour calendar was Cliff Eberhardt & Louise Mosrie – and we were only able to publicize them for one week. The July schedule will include Windborne, Trout Fishing, and the Birthday Party; I think we’ll see improved numbers in July.

Tina Ross has booked a particularly exciting guest for her August Inside the Song program. Tina and I brainstormed some ways to attract more viewers to it.

E-communications – Mark Schaffer

e-Communications Report for July 2022 Board Meeting.

The big news is the runaway hit movie, Free Banana Night: The Movie, was a huge hit - 72 viewers in two weeks.

The 30-day standard metrics I submit every month: 50,869 Sends; 17,585 Opens (34.6% on Sends); 747 Clicks (4.2% of Opens).

These standard metrics include Volunteer and Troubadour poster emails, which get similar open rates to the Music Alert, and the newsletter, which gets a higher 50% open rate. For a closer examination of actual Music Alert opens and rates, I broke out Music Alerts to illustrate there’s no value in breaking out Music Alerts every month.

Time Sent Campaign Name Subject Line Sends Opens Open Rate

2022/06/27 4:44 PM Music Alert 237 062722 Tuesday: Stuart Kabak 4519 1319 30.7%

2022/06/23 6:31 PM Music Alert 238 062322 Friday: Cliff Eberhardt & Louise Mosrie 4521 1514 35.3%

2022/06/20 4:47 PM Music Alert 237 062022 Tuesday: Alice DiMicele, Plus a Peek into the Future 4520 1561 36.6%

2022/06/16 3:12 PM Music Alert 236 061622 Friday: Sam Edelston with Joe Giacoio 4520 1513 35.5%

2022/06/13 9:39 PM Music Alert 235 061322 Tuesday: Two of a Kind 4525 1567 36.7%

2022/06/09 5:34 PM Music Alert 234 060922 FRIDAY: BANANAS – SATURDAY “EMERGENCY” 4525 1568 36.7%

MUSIC PARTY

2022/06/06 3:57 PM Music Alert 233 060622 SATURDAY MUSIC PARTY MOVED – Tuesday: Frank & Hank 4530 1868 43.6%

2022/06/02 12:25 PM Music Alert 232 060222 Friday – Reeds, Rhythm and All That Brass 4532 1527 35.7%

If anyone would like to help editing the Music Alert, let me know. It’s about an hour of clerical work - cutting, pasting, downloading - twice a week, before editorial work begins.

Mark Schaffer, e-Communications Subchair.

Facebook – Kathi Caccavale

I haven’t received Kathi’s report yet.

Folk Project Page: 4,352 people Like this. 5,468 Followers.

Folk Project group: 1,644 members, up 26 from 1,618 last month.

NJ Uke Fest group: 243 members; same as 243 last month.

Swingin’ Tern group: 597 members; up from 593 from last month.

See below for the Facebook Overview report that I just pulled down…

Twitter, Instagram – Jean Scully

No report from Jean, but the Music Alert continues to get posted to both Twitter and Instagram.

YouTube – Joe Guzzo

Sam commenting in place of Joe, who hasn’t submitted a report.

• Folk Project’s YouTube channel has been renamed “The Folk Project.”

• Tina Ross’s “Inside the Song” audio shows have been uploaded. As of 7/3, three videos are visible, and 7 other are uploaded but haven’t yet been made visible.

Web – John Lamb

May and June have been active months on the web front. First of all, apologies to those whose requests received a delayed response in the first half of June - an exceptional series of events took almost all of my time during that period. This report serves as both the June report and a replacement for the much-abbreviated May report.

We helped Swingin' Tern with changes to their web page regarding their new venue and by refreshing Doug on the procedure to use for entering events that he had not need to use in a while.

We did work on several fronts for Troubadour, including touching up some of the entries made by Mike to insure that they produced correct output for our home page, updates following the changing notices about our COVID requirements as the board updated policies and the count threat level increased, warning messages related to the bathroom renovation at MUUF, a reminder on how to view members of email group forwarders, changes as the birthday show was scheduled, cancelled and rescheduled, minor bug fixes for the Tally Sheet and an investigation of why the spreadsheet that produces names of pre-show ticket sales was reporting many more entries than it should have for a recent show.

We made some minor updates for the UkeFest page.

For Horses Sing None of It, we fixed some issues that were preventing Ralph from entering his own data for broadcasts created when one of our WordPress plugins got updated. We also took care of a password reset, entered several broadcast events and added a couple of new broadcast channels in central Massachusetts for HSNOI.

We made some minor changes for Getaway when they decided to webcast their Friday evening concert.

We added new events for Inside The Song.

At the request of Gary for Streaming Tuesdays, we created a page that lists past events. This serves to show the level of talent that we bring in for our events when Gary is working to schedule future acts for Streaming Tuesdays. It is also a stopgap replacement for the full-blown History page that I want to get on the site some day. Have a look at https://folkproject.org/past-events/

One of the larger time commitments was in helping Todd with setting up a new program called CiviCRM that he intends to use to automate many of the membership processes. To do that, we had to set up an entirely new website completely separate from folkproject.org, then install and configure the CiviCRM software on it. We needed a separate website for this because CiviCRM is resource intensive and does not coexist well with other sites like ours that are also very resource intensive. At present, I have it about 90% set up and Todd is starting to transfer our membership data over into it. It is a very large, complex program and it may take some time for us to get our heads around it. This program is specifically designed for and widely used by nonprofits to manage memberships, run donation drives and generally manage many other aspects of business. As such there is a pretty big cottage industry that has sprung up around its care and feeding plus a lot of shared experience that I have tapped into to get as far as we have.

Finally, we performed the usual minor updates and typo repairs throughout the site and attended to email address changes.

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

John Lamb, Folk Project Webmaster

Merch – Paul Fisher (acting)

Nothing new.

Swingin' Tern report -- June 2022

May wasn't bad and June was better. That's encouraging because we had good

attendance and many contributions at our reopening dance on May 7.

Our new hall is excellent. St. Paul's has air conditioning, a real

advantage in the summer. Obviously the air conditioning encourages

attendance during the summer months, which at least partially offsets the

additional rent we now pay.

On June 4 Donna Hunt called to Grand Picnic, and on June 18 Bob Isaacs

called to Torrent.

For the month we lost $35. A loss, but a step forward from May.

Leigh Walker

Swingin' Tern

Hello Everyone,

Attached are the P&L statements. I am trying out a new format that will make reading the report easier than having to scroll back and forth to read the report.

Attention, JUNE IS INCLUDED but there are still a few numbers not reflected. The P&L report changes daily as money comes and goes. It is always just a snapshot in time as to where our finances stand. Checks don't get cashed and people don't get reports or expenses to me. I want to provide as much information as possible. Keep in mind the report will never be exact until we close out the year. I have gotten reimbursement requests months later.

I have broken down the reports into smaller easier to read groups along with a summary of the parts. It is self explanatory. If you have any questions just ask. I am still tweaking the classes to best reflect how the Folk Project works. Karen created the summary report. Be sure to notice -$ is a negative number in that report. Yes, we have lost -$9,681 to date this year. I am looking into being able to write that report in quickbooks.

Another thing to keep in mind as you look at the numbers for the Getaway. In years past Chris did some bookkeeping so you didn’t see the Getaway’s losses. We never actually took the money out of the Vanguard account. We only used the funds to calculate an amount of money. We always had enough cash in our Money Market Fund to cover the allowance. It was easier and smarter than having to sell shares from the Vanguard that were earning way more than the surplus cash in the money market. We would then essentially write an "IOU" to General Funds when we took the cash. The Vanguard is set up solely as support for the getaway. The General Funds Portion is the accumulated funds given to the getaways from our profits that were not taken from the Vanguard.

It is easy to see we are losing money. We have had enough in our Money Market to cover all our expenses to date. The Finance committee is looking into solutions and hopes to have something for The Board in the future.

Respectfully Submitted

Peggy Karr

Treasurer

From: The Troubadour <mike.agranoff@folkproject.org>

To: 'BoardPlus - Current board, select alumni, key volunteers' <boardplus@folkproject.org>

Sent: Tue, Jun 28, 2022 4:27 pm

Subject: Troubadour Booking Report, July 2022

Things continue to go poorly since we’ve restarted shows. Year to Date, we’ve averaged only 35.5 paid attendees (46 total attendees) per show. We’ve lost a total of $740 for June and $2, 869 for the year. I will continue to cover the losses through the end of 2022. But if things do not pick up by year’s end, I’m going to stop doing that, and we will need to re-examine our operations.

The SummerSongs member-show was canceled only 2 weeks before the actual date of that show. I, and various other people had to do some scrambling to find Cliff Eberhardt and Louise Mosrie as a replacement, and then get the change posted on our calendar and get the word out. Consequently, attendance for that show was pretty skimpy as a result (only 26 paid), far less than they would have had with more advance notice.

We had a problem with the equipment at MUUF on June 3 for the Reeds, Rhythm and All That Brass show, and we were unable to stream that show. That was cleared up by the following week.

We had an unusual situation on the June 24^th show with advance ticket sales. The report from called Woo Commerce (which is a WordPress plugin that connects our ticket sales to our PayPal account) showed 36 advance sales, but of those, only about a half dozen actually showed up. As it turned out, this was because we had presented two shows with exactly the same title, “Cliff Eberhardt and Louise Mosrie”, one in 2021 and another in 2022. Woo Commerce reported all the advance sales for both shows. That’s liable to be a very rare occurrence, but John Lamb is working on a fix in case it happens again.

New bookings made in June:

A couple of hot guitarists:

1. Aug. 19: World renowned Celtic guitarist Tony McManus

2. Sept. 2: Ex National Fingerstyle Guitar Champion, Muriel Anderson

3. March 24, 2023: The Kennedys

Highlights coming in July

Three really great shows next month:

1. July 15: A great vocal harmony night with Windborne, a young quartet of singers taking the folk word by storm, along with our own favorite vocalists, Ken & Pat Rolston opening

2. July 22: Nationally known duo, Trout Fishing in America

3. July 29: The Folk Project Birthday Show. This year being produced by the Open Stage Committee.

In response to the news on June 30 that Morris County’s Community Risk Level has dropped from High to Medium, The Troubadour’s COVID precautions have been altered to comply with the Reopening Committee’s recommendations, to wit, masking is now recommended, rather than mandated. However, in order to ease concerns of patrons who might feel uncomfortable sitting next to unmasked strangers, we have designated half the hall to be masks required, and the other half to be masks optional. This is a stricter regulation than the CDC recommendation, and therefore permissible under the Reopening Committee’s recommendations.

Respectfully submitted:

Mike Agranoff

Program Chair

The Troubadour Acoustic Concert Series

Morristown, NJ. USA

www.Troubadour.FolkProject.org