Following a call today (22/05/17) with @Nadia and @Noemi, we discussed the following points:
1. Improving Newsletter circulation
We currently have two email lists, a list of Edgeryders community members and one for the opt-in newsletter. One suggestion was to send out a semi-regular newsletter to the former, however without consent to use the email for marketing purposes this is not possible. One solution proposed: an option to ask new members if they would also like to opt in to the newsletter on sign up, as a way of growing our currently small newsletter circulation.
2. Identifying drop off points
Google Analytics shows drop offs on different sections of the site - what can this tell us about improving the site flow? The consensus seems to be that the data is too broad (it covers all pages such as 404s, including old posts rather than relevant content) to be useful at this point - rather than delve into this problem (which ties in to UX/Web Design) we have agreed to focus at this point on increasing sign ups and newsletter subscriptions.
3. Weekly open call
@Nadia pointed out the weekly call is a very good gateway for new members to become active participants in the site - we will be emphasising this in our status updates and also picking a theme for the call each week. This will be a talking point announced ahead of time that will complement the open ended conversation. We will be drafting a list of themes that can be picked from each week.
4. Raising awareness of the Open Village event
More needs to be done to highlight the event in the proposal posts (there is a lack of clarity about the event), which can be announced at the end of each post. I will be drafting a footer template for this purpose (and the following point).
5. Improving user engagement
We are seeing a steady influx of new users, many of whom do not post or comment. What can we do to effectively incentivise new users to participate in the community? We discussed three strategies:
Drive sign ups and traffic, inevitably a portion of these new users will comment, increasing conversation and engagement on the platform
Highlighting comments of different posts, this means bringing forth the active community onto the front page or community main page, inviting people to join in on the conversation.
Explicitely asking to comment, which will be the purpose of the footer (it is important to communicate this not in a forceful, annoying way but as an invitation to join the conversation)
6. Improving Twitter connections
We briefly touched on the idea of pinging users on Twitter for comments on articles. I see this rather skeptically, if I know the person or am already involved in a conversation it can be a natural approach, but systematically picking users to mention borders on spamming (I get a lot of irrelevant marketing mentions on my own Twitter handle and invariably ignore them).
7. Creating blog post for the weekend newsletter
We will be publishing the weekend newsletter as a blog post so it is not limited to email subscribers. We will also be sending out the headlines email on Monday, Wednesday and Friday from now on. @Noemi mentioned emails from Mailchimp get filtered as spam - not the case in my inbox but maybe for others?
Input on all points welcome. Without going into Web Design / UX territory, which I have little knowledge of, I’m interested in thoughts on improving user engagement within the site for new users (so I’ll leave it as an open ended question). Wishing you all a good week.
Meanwhile: @matthias you see the block containing the purple “share your thoughts…learning forward” banner at the bottom of every blogpost- How do I change the image itself? - I tried panel but doesn’t seem it is modified from there…
Your Pt 1. I still am unclear as to why we are sending the weekend newsletter (only) to the CountOnMe list as it is a more general format and could use being read by more people… is it because we cant legally use imported emails from edgeryders.eu? This is less marketing and more keeping people up to date. Are we liable?
Your Pt 3. Weekly calls
See Blog post - Book a call with a Festival Curator! I suggest we push it out after tomorrow, because this Wed community call is pretty full - I have been organising it and got email confirmations from a bunch of session proponents.
Your pt 6: More twitter lists which we can try, I picked those with people that we know personally (at least most of them) to avoid the perils you mentioned:
It depends on what keeping up to date means - if it’s site maintenance, password or policy changes that’s fine. I think weekly headlines fall into the marketing category, and hence should not be sent to people who have not consented to receive such emails. I think a simple option to subscribe to the newsletter on sign up would go a long way.
Pt.4 Individual Posts introducing the Curators and their topics
I am producing a number of posts featuring specific people and content with an invitation to join us. What do you think of this format @Owen? Anything I should change?
Hi @Nadia… looks good. I’ve done a few edits. hashtag might be better #woodworking rather than #woodmaking. Thanks!
She has described herself as ‘A hoarder of bits of thinking and half formed disruptive thoughts with occasional bouts of fundamentalism about things that should be simple.’ Gehan lives in Glasgow, Scotland where she co-founded the GalGael Trust, a working community who take on demanding common tasks that demonstrate ways of living with greater humanity in our times. They run a large physical space consisting of a carpentry workshop, metal forge, co-working stations for makers, and timber mill. The workshop creates a space of social and practical solidarity among its workers and participants - many live lives that have been battered by storms such as worklessness, depression or addiction. They work together on demanding projects which require collaborative effort. Some of the products are sold through their social enterprise. Their traditional wooden boats take people out on the river to see the city and the world from a new perspective.
Gehan is curating a track at the OpenVillage Festival in Brussels this October. It is a participant built event dedicated to bringing together existing projects into a demo of a new health and social care system powered by open source, community-driven solutions (“opencare”). We are interested in what our peers already already are doing in different parts of the world, and what we can do together.
Are you interested in how to build healthy organisations, communities or healthy societies - humming with human flourishing? Perhaps you might like to join us?
Thanks - it looks good. I made a few minor edits in the text.
The quality of that picture suffers a little at that size. I tried replacing it with a better one, but it was a bit too much to the other extreme. We can go with this one.
Pt.7. Mailchimp newsletters disappearing for me too
I had a false memory that I recieve them, but I only do because the mailchimp is tied to the edgeryders email account. So yeah, it doesn’t seem to be working…
They go straight to my nnegash@gmail account. Is my nadia@edgeryders.eu address on the list? If yes, then it’s not getting past the spam filter only gmail.
I receive them, but Gmail has a very peculiar way to deal with the Inbox. I have a filter on flagging Countonme as important, and they still did not go to the Inbox. Now they do, but I had to override the settings, so that all important stuff is channeled to the Inbox.
