Holding a film festival? Increase the power of your WOM marketing 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 toolkit focused on community engagement.This post describes what you need to create your toolkit!

1. 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:
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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 toolkit focused on community
engagement.
My favorite was developed for the 2014 Atlanta Jewish Film Festival. The toolkit is a link on the
film festival website that is only accessible by committee members.
How to create your Community Engagement Toolkit:
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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

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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 schedule, time & location of films
Provide incentives for committee members to use such as discount price codes and
group prices
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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.
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. Reel Power Films links non-fiction film to cutting-edge activism. The toolkit is
created for use by different community dedicated to leveraging the power of storytelling
through documentary film to advance struggles for social, economic, environmental justice and
human and civil rights.
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@creativesi.com.
Enjoy the film festival!!