The Power of Community Engagement Committees to market your Film Festival

Holding a film festival? Well, your festival promotion is key to its success.

Word of Mouth (WOM) still rules when engaging people to participate. Through WOM marketing you:

• Invite community organizations to join you and promote the films to their members.
• Ask volunteers and members to invite their friends and family.
• Send messages that your team can forward to their email list.
• Always include information about and a link to ticket sales.

*       Checkout Promoting a Film Festival in Three Weeks! 

Increase the power of WOM through a Community Engagement Committee. Charge the committee to assist in promoting your film festival to various groups within your greater community.

Your committee’s success depends on having  a good marketing tool kit. My favorite was developed for the 2014 Atlanta Jewish Film Festival Community Engagement Committee. The toolkit is a link on the film festival website that is only accessible by committee members.

Steps to creating a Community Engagement Toolkit:

• Create PDF files of the movie description in your film festival program. Here are a couple examples:

Brave Miss World

Esther Broner: A Weave of Women

• Create a Handout of films by subject. Key each film to the page in the program.
• Post a PDF of the Film Festival Program
• Create a file that shows where each film is showing and at what time
• Provide incentives for committee members to use such as discount price codes and group prices

1. Schedule meetings with Community Engagement committee members.
2. Provide a list of materials that can be found on Community Engagement Link.
3. Capture information on outreach possibilities discussed at meetings.
4. Offer staff support if a committee member needs help putting together visuals for face to face meetings.
5. Create a tracking tool for committee members.
6. Create a master spreadsheet of what outreach worked.

Another Community Engagement Toolkit favorite is Reel Power Films Fueling the Energy Revolution. 

Do you have any suggestions for a Community Engagement Toolkit? We’d love to hear from you.

Want a copy of the CS&I Film Festival PR Template? Please contact me at deborah@creative-si.com.

Enjoy the film festival!!