THE START

THE SIREN’s origin story is simple enough. Leave a frustrated person with a technical background and a love of arts alone during an icy winter cold-snap for long enough, and something is bound to happen. It started as a fairly nebulous New Years resolution and a desire to do what I could to highlight the amazing artists, makers, and small businesses in the tiny city of Waitsburg.

The website was cobbled together in the first couple weeks of January 2024, and the first social media post happened on January 27. The $8k flip sign calendar I wanted for my Main Street window was out of my shoestring budget, so Simply Sawdust’s Gloria Wilson made me a special jig and set me up with a drill press so I could create an interchangeable paper calendar that highlights ten events at a time. And so it began.

CURRENT STATE

Currently, THE SIREN is updated (website and window calendar) weekly and as needed to keep the calendar and events fresh, publishes a weekly newsletter to an email list, and posts to social media channels at least once a week. Growth has been organic, modest, and generally well-received, despite the limited focus on marketing. Requests have been made by users of THE SIREN to expand to surrounding locations, and this is currently being tested with friends from our creative tribe in the area.

THE SIREN serves multiple audiences to promote local events and artists, with majority from Washington state but outside of Waitsburg, followed by Oregon and California. The largest traffic source is ‘Direct’ at 58.9% with a devoted group accessing the website from saved phone screen icons and browser bookmarks, followed by 22% ‘Search’, 16% referrals from the City of Waitsburg and Royal Block websites, and 1%+ from Social. This suggests a strong use by people planning on visiting Waitsburg, and is functioning as designed pushing users directly to businesses and events. The ‘Welcome’ page (containing the next ten events and collection display of ‘Explore’ items) has an average visit time of 2 minutes 12 seconds indicating a healthy viewing duration, followed by the longer calendar view of the ‘Events’ page.

Social media posts demonstrate low engagement (likes or comments) but high view counts (average 21 visits per account within the past 90 days) with 78.3% from followers on Instagram, vs an anemic 12.9% from followers on Facebook. My sense both from the data and anecdotal evidence suggests that people read to get the information they need and move on, just as I post and move on. No effort has been made to set up measurable activities, like driving people to dedicated pages or tracking movement. There has been no effort put towards cultivation or relationship building aside from ’liking’ Waitsburg businesses posts, and a few cross-posting failures have occurred from Instagram to Facebook, so the lack of engagement is logical. This could be an area to expand on moving forward.

As a self-pub passion project, THE SIREN has been self-funded and excluding website development costs for new initiatives, pencils out to roughly $1,300 for software/technical/hosting costs annually, another $300 or so for physical materials, and takes about 500+ hours of labor to produce annually. Currently, THE SIREN holds no dedicated equipment, doesn’t contribute to onsite utility or real estate costs, and exists at the will and funding of one person. As pointed out by concerned businesses and community members who feel they aren’t contributing, this isn’t ideal.

Thus, we are now evaluating ways to make THE SIREN sustainable. A fundraising goal of $10k would cover hosting and software costs, allow hardware replacement for a failing Macbook Pro that has been used.

CONSIDERATIONS

WHERE WE’RE GOING

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