Jump On It: Outreach During Your Festival Launch
by filmpresence on December 2, 2011 in Festival Strategy
by Merrill Sterritt
When we started Film Presence, most outreach efforts were being applied to community and grassroots screenings, but not at the theatrical level. It became clear there was a need for similar engagement around the theatrical openings of films that had tight budgets and clear audiences. This has become the core of the work that we do at Film Presence, and over time, we have found that some of the same strategies can be applied at the festival launch. Here are a few of the outreach tools we use that apply to festival premieres:
Social media
This is the first and most obvious tool for raising awareness. If your film didn’t have Facebook and Twitter presence before being accepted into its first festival, make sure it is now. You’ll want to engage those first viewers coming out of your premiere screenings, who are tweeting/posting short, quotable “reviews” of your film. You can hang onto those for later, and also engage with these new fans instantly, with the right apps installed on your phone. If you’re a one-man show, just be sure to set up tracking of the film’s title and any key words before the festival, so relevant posts will be easier to find find on the fly.
Organizational partners
This is a good time to start alerting national partners about your film’s existence, if you’ve not already done so. Many non-film people don’t know what the point of a festival launch is, but if you’re premiering in one with a fancy/recognizable name (Sundance, SXSW, Toronto…) or big city (Chicago, NY, DC…), they will know that means something important! Even if they can’t collaborate with you at this stage, this initial contact will help kickstart your relationships further down the line.
Group sales & Passes
Find out from the festival how many tickets/passes you’ll get to each screening and use them wisely. If you’re not sure who to ask, just check in with the press office. Before you give them all out to press, industry, and crew, think about whom locally should see your film and would talk about it. Look at the national partners above and find their regional branches or local versions. Also think about if your film is a good fit for school groups, church groups, community groups, etc. Is the festival easy for the general public to navigate or more of an industry event? A full theater makes for a much better screening for everyone. Ticket giveaways through social media and radio are a great way to alert the local public to your screening. When ELEVATE, a documentary about West African teens coming to the U.S. to play for NCAA teams, premiered at SXSW last March, we worked with the Texas Longhorns’ radio station to do a ticket giveaway to local listeners in Austin. It was a great way to engage the local community and target audience!
Street teams & “outsourcing”
You’re going to be overwhelmed at your premiere festival, so this is a great time to start “outsourcing” some work. Find a couple local college students ahead of time who can handle postcards and mini-posters for you. Usually they’re just excited to be involved in a “real” movie with a “real” filmmaker, and the festival itself to a capacity, but you can also give them a couple tickets and invite them to your after party to sweeten the deal. The best way to find volunteers is through the film department at the regional college or university. We found a volunteer for FAMBUL TOK, a film about grassroots reconciliation in Sierra Leone, through the University of Austin Art Program when it premiered at SXSW.
Materials
Speaking of postcards, this is an easy area to spend too much of your time. Just try to pick the most eye-catching and effective design, make sure the cards get distributed a few times, and move on to your bigger issues. Make sure your screening times and venues are clear, your catch line is catchy, and your image pops. And then move on. There will be a lot of postcards out at the festival, and you have a lot of other things to worry about.
Website
Oftentimes, festivals don’t give you much heads up when you’re accepted, so things slips through the cracks in the flurry of getting ready to premiere. It’s important to make sure your website is clear and concise before you head out. When daily festival reviews and wrap-ups start appearing on the Internet that include your film, the first place readers will head is to your site. Even though you don’t have any distribution yet, is it clear what you want to do with the film? What your goals are? Who people can contact if they want to book or screen the film? Make sure that is streamlined ahead of time so you don’t miss out on future opportunities. Here’s a great example of a website that has it’s sh*t together, a recently accepted film in the Sundance Line-Up called INDIE GAME: http://www.indiegamethemovie.com (They have the essentials in place: social media, newsletter sign up, trailer, laurels, title, contact info, pre-orders, screening requests – looks like they’ve done their homework!)
Taking an independent film to a festival can feel overwhelming and expensive, but it is doable, especially if you think outside of the industry box. We have worked with films at both Sundance and SXSW, and netting and communicating with your audience at that stage can really start to create your first wave of ambassadors. If you have questions about other ways to engage your audience at the festival level, feel free to contact us!
And if you need any more encouragement to get you to jump on it, watch this!