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:
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
- Schedule meetings with Community Engagement committee members.
- Provide a list of materials that can be found on Community Engagement Link.
- Capture information on outreach possibilities discussed at meetings.
- Offer staff support if a committee member needs help putting together visuals for face to face meetings.
- Create a tracking tool for committee members.
- 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!!
