We would like to extend a gracious hello and welcome to both newcomers and old friends who are visiting our new site for the first time!
We decided to go on a bit of a summer hiatus, until Friday August 5th, in many ways to take time off to build a proper online presence and create a lasting brand. Like many events, of all kinds, we were largely co-dependent on Facebook to draw our crowds and get the word out. Facebook, however, has become increasingly muddy for promoters to navigate through. For a time, there was not only no limit to the number of people you could invite to your events but you could invite people that signed up to your Facebook group page directly. First, the latter option was disbanded and then strict and seemingly arbitrary limits were put on invitations to events themselves.
So Facebook fan pages were the go to method but instead Facebook decided that no more than 16% of the people that liked your page will see your posts unless you pay money to "boost" them. Of course, this is money ON TOP of the money you often spend to promote the fan page to get likes in the first place!
If you are running events as an act of love and passion, like we and many like us are, as opposed to events focused on heavy returns on investment this form of promotion was quite simply not economically feasible. And frustrating.
But, for those of you that spend most of your time on Facebook or enjoy our presence there, don't worry as we are not abandoning the platform. We will continue to manage the fan and group pages and still intend to create Facebook events (and we will link you to them both in our email newsletters and in our "upcoming events" section). So it'll be easy for you to still invite friends and get notifications to remind you when our events are coming up. This is just a little back story on how we arrived here and why the time off.
What we have on the site I think is pretty self explanatory at the moment. You have an about us page, which is just that, and offers you links to external sites like our artist's official site (if you would like to contact her), our venue's site, our mixcloud site, and our official email address.
Our media and gallery page is for videos and pictures from our events that our lovely hostess, Roe, has filmed or photographed. Due to site limitations we cannot post EVERY picture from the events, so we WILL continue to use both the Facebook Fan and Group pages for this if you would like to find and/or tag yourselves. Also, if you have pictures or videos you took at our shows and would like to contribute them simply email us and we'll see what we can do.
Upcoming events are, well, exactly that. Once we have the Facebook event page listed we'll link it in the upcoming events description so you can easily navigate to it. I also intend to put a link to an easily downloadable and printable drink ticket in the events. We'll try and keep them simple in design so it doesn't drain your printer ink just to get some cheap or free booze!
Merchandise takes you to a page of merch that our artist designed. You can buy cell phone cases, notebooks, t-shirts, leggings, and more so I suggest taking a gander. The products will be updated as she gets time and/or if we get any special requests.
This will serve as both a blog, for meandering posts like this one, and news like you'll find if you squint and read through my wordiness. Really it's just meant to be a way to connect with you and hopefully build a community to interact in.
And finally, our "Get Notified" button will sign you up for our newsletter. We don't spam and we don't share your email address with anyone. It's our best way of communicating directly with you so I highly recommend signing up if you have
I think that about sums things up for now. Explore around and keep in touch. "We love our audience, we love our audience!"
-- Ryan & the Nrpps Crew