To us, transparency matters

When Miranda, Sam and I started Ipswich.love, we knew we wanted to make sure what we were doing for the town was available to all, a useful resource, and was open and transparent.

Since Ipswich.love started, our website has gone from hosting a handful of Love Letters to the town (which ended up being exhibited outside the Wolsey Theatre), to a site that hosts details of over 500 businesses in our new Directory and lists over 700 things to do every week in and around Ipswich.

But we also have a lot more to share about how our site is used, so I’m pleased to be able to share reach.ipswich.love which is an open window to how the ipswich.love site is performing for the people of Ipswich.

We all firmly believe that we should lead from the front and set an example for other institutions to show how their projects are performing for the good of the town.

You can visit reach.ipswich.love and see how the site, our email campaigns and our visibility on search engines is doing.

If you want a quick snapshot of how we’re doing:

In the last 12 Months

Newsletter

• Subscribers grew from 831 to 1,413 — up 70% in a year.
• The list now gets a ~41% open rate (4 sends in May 2026, 40.7% opens / 7.0% clicks) — and regular sends only began in September 2025, so this is a standing start.

Website traffic

• Monthly visits rose from 4,376 to 7,709 — up 76%.
• Monthly visitors nearly doubled: 2,959 → 5,456 (+84%).
• Across the full year the site drew ~65,800 visits, up from ~38,400 the year before (+72%).

Events & community

• Over 35,000 visitors have clicked through from an event listing on Ipswich.love to the event host’s website.
• Events listed in a single month climbed from 1,320 to 1,901 (+44%).
• The calendar carried more than 20,000 events over the past year.
• The network behind them widened too: venues 68 → 93 (+37%) and hosts/organisers 149 → 206 (+38%).

Search

• Over the year, ipswich.love pulled ~90,700 clicks from 3.5 million Google impressions.
• Average search ranking improved from position 12.4 to 9.9 — moving up onto page one.

Free to use, not free to run

Everything you’ve just read is free, and it’ll stay that way. But keeping it running isn’t. The hosting, the newsletter that now reaches 1,413 people, the system behind 700-plus things to do every week — it all costs money, and it’s built in evenings and weekends by three of us who love this town. Sometimes, we’re fortunate to receive small grants to complete bigger projects (have you seen our Directory of Ipswich Businesses?)

Our hosting company recently put our prices up by over 300% – so we’re something of a victim of our own success!

Can you help?

So here’s the honest ask. If the events, the Directory, the Love Letters — or this new window onto how it’s all doing — have been worth something to you, help us keep them going. Whatever you can spare goes straight back into the site and any projects we work on for the benefit of Ipswich.

No pressure, and no hard feelings if now isn’t the time, but if you’ve ever found something to do on a slow weekend because of us, this is how you say thank you.

Donate to Ipswich.love

Make a small one-off or a recurring donation to support our work. We truly appreciate your support.

Support Ipswich.love

Who wrote this about Ipswich?

James Kindred

James lives in Ipswich and has been a graphic designer and brand founder for the last 25 years. He specialises in branding, startups, guerilla marketing and effectively frustrating authority figures to deliver results. James is co-founder of Ipswich.love, co-chair of the Suffolk Autism Strategy board and a board advisor to R;ipple, a suicide prevention charity.