FP Logo Folk Project: Activity Listing Information

From: George Otto, FP Webmaster

To: Arts and Cultural Events Website Administrators

Re: Getting Folk Project Events Listed on your Website

The Folk Project runs some 75 events per year. We maintain our own website and send out a newsletter to our over 600 members. We also send out monthly publicity materials to about 140 arts news outlets per month.

We are keenly aware that publicity is important to getting the word out about our activities, and are interested in having our activities posted on arts-related websites that people in the Northern New Jersey area will visit. However, it is not time effective to try to post our events on sites whose only means of entering information into their system is by web forms. Even trying to use a modest 5 such sites would entail making 375 tedious and error-prone entries in the course of a year. Since we have all our event information in a database, and you would like to get that same information into your database, it makes sense for us to pass you our information without the need for manual intervention on either side.

We do submit our entries to sites that accept batch submissions, and we are willing to format our database of events to meet your batch submission needs. The three key ways this is currently done is by submissions to sites that

  1. support programs that actively and automatically post entries that meet their parsing requirements, such as the Musi-Cal Gig Gopher,
  2. accept Excel spreadsheets of performance information, one event per line, or
  3. accept faxed or emailed information which they manually enter into their local databases, such as Dirty Linen magazine.
If your site currently supports only form fillout submissions, we would like to encourage you to consider expanding your processing to accept one of the types listed above. The easiest and most direct format for such batch-submission would probably be an Excel spreadsheet with each field of the spreadsheet matching a field in your web form, each line corresponding to a separate event. However, we are also able to support the emerging XML standard for computer-to-computer data exchange, if that would interest you.

Please contact me at if you would like us to send you batch monthly publicity submissions using one of these methods.

Sincerely,
George Otto
Webmaster
Folk Project

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