#TBT - Grassroots Distribution: HOLIDAY EDITION!

originally published in TIME

Happy Holidays from the CRI! We hope you have all enjoyed, and continue to enjoy, this holiday season!

As promised, this week we'll pick up Nicco Mele's digital campaign theory and structure with Josh and Michael's adaptations for independent filmmakers. 

Last week we referenced Mele's 3 Pillars of a Digital Campaign: build a substantial email list, foster and online community, and complement online effort with offline action. Now, we drill deeper to think about 5 elements that a campaign needs to succeed, adapted for film. 

1. Raise money. FILM EQUIVALENT: A film’s distribution will necessitate some sort of fiscal support, even if it is the bare minimum, though it will never compare to the way that money is the lifeblood of a political campaign. Distribution costs should certainly be accounted for, but whether or not fundraising should be an “ask” in the film’s distribution campaign depends on if the film’s campaign is for the film itself or tied to another cause. If it’s an external action or a social issue film, given Kickstarter statistics, it seems realistic to attempt to fundraise for film (production, post-production, and) distribution costs. Raising money for a film in general (not just limited to distribution) is an altogether different topic, but inextricably linked to ours; we will revisit that in a moment.
2. Have a message. FILM EQUIVALENT: The message is essentially the film itself. If you have a film that no one is excited about, it is the equivalent of having a politician that doesn’t have a clear message: it will be very hard to connect to an audience.
3. Communicate the message through media. FILM EQUIVALENT: This would refer to how the advocates of the film—the grassroots operators, be it on the phone, in person, or over the internet—talk about the film. The mandate for them from an Obama organizing background would be to make it personal: to communicate what about this film and its story resonates with them personally. That honesty will appeal to whoever is being engaged. 
4. Deal with press. FILM EQUIVALENT: Probably the most literal parallel –with a film in distribution, one has to be strategic about what press is reached out to and engaged. A grassroots perspective would also tell you that the best press is not necessarily the biggest outlet. Sometimes a well-placed news item in front of the right niche audience could mean the difference for that community taking your film seriously. 
5. Field or turnout operation. FILM EQUIVALENT: At the end of the day, who do you have working or volunteering for you that will make sure that people turn out to go see the film on opening day? What does the operation on that day—the equivalent of Election Day—look like? Who is your grassroots army, and how have you delegated them? By geography? By theater? Or just via social network?

We hope these adaptations help you produce and distribute your next film! Let us know how it goes, and we'll see you in 2015!

#TBT - Grassroots Distribution: Offline Organizing Leads to Online Metrics

Last #TBT, we looked at growing campaigns, and identified three models, based on social action campaigns, that filmmakers might follow to boost their audience awareness and get their film out into the world in the most effective way possible. This Thursday, we dig into the digital elements of a campaign as outlined by Harvard professor Nicco Mele and, next week, we'll revisit Josh and Michael's suggestions for adapting Professor Mele's digital political campaign model to film. 

Why? Because Josh and Michael learned that offline organizing leads to online metrics. Offline organizing is already accessible to filmmakers who are taking their films on the road as they screen at festivals and alternative exhibition venues. Online metrics can help filmmakers know where to go next, where to return with the next project, which audience (or audiences) to engage as advocates and supporters, and - not least - online metrics can help filmmakers make the case for their next film to financiers, sales agents, and distributors (see our video with Stewart Thorndike and Alex Scharfman on Distribution as Marketing).

Plus, it's notoriously hard to get data once you give your film to someone else to market or distribute. Treasure the data you can produce for yourself. 

Now: Mele's Three Pillars of a Digital Campaign 

1. Build a substantially-sized email list. "People live overwhelmingly in their inbox."
2. Foster online community. "The care and feeding of evangelists is necessary for online success."
3. Complement online with offline. "Politics is really a face-to-face business and you really have to be able to use the internet to drive people to meet face to face."

Here's an example of these Pillars in practice, from the white paper: 

"Tom Quinn [...] made a film that is set during the Mummers' Day Parade in Philadelphia. Quinn recalls that to distribute his film he 'went around to a good chunk of the Mummers clubs, and talked one-on-one with them about we were going to donate a part of the proceeds back to the parade, and the Mummers organization got behind the film doing press as well, which was huge. I think our Facebook fans went from 200 people to 2300 people in one week."

Offline organizing can lead to a rise in online metrics. 

Online metrics can help you sell your film, or fundraise for your next one. 

Engage the communities that exist around your film, and make them your advocate audience!

#TBT - Grassroots Distribution: Growing (Cam)Pains

Last week we talked about trusting your communities - from production crews, to PR staff, to local supporters, and beyond - to help bring your film to the world. It's a Snowflake Model of film marketing and distribution. 

In order to make that strategy effective, you need to know your film's message, boundaries, and opportunities. You need to define a campaign. 

Josh and Michael identified 3 kinds of campaigns that filmmakers can apply to their film's marketing and distribution plans:

1. Film that is its own campaign 
2. Film for social action  
3. Film as social action  

FILM THAT IS ITS OWN CAMPAIGN. 

The surmountable challenge to organize around is the film’s presence and life in the public consciousness and the larger marketplace. This is what volunteers and organizers would advocate for, and the agenda they would be pushing at every step. This seems the purest form of campaign and best use of organizing tactics; if one is to use grassroots organizing in film, it stands to reason it should be to solve the problem of birthing and supporting a film’s life in the world of an audience, with no other goal.

What we did with Beasts of the Southern Wild, to complement Fox’s mega marketing machine, would fall in this category. We mobilized members of our crew to go to Q & A’s in regional theaters, as a draw to get audiences to come out, and deepen the connection they had with the film, which could then be transferred into their own advocacy (snowflake model!). The thing we were up against, we would say, was the marketplace itself and the very tiny room that Hollywood’s relationship with exhibitors allows for a small independent film like Beasts. We managed the message of our online presence in complementary ways.

FILM FOR SOCIAL ACTION 

In this paradigm, the film—though its own work in and of itself—is being used as a political 
tool to accomplish other action. It is, in other words, part of an organizer’s arsenal—a 
way of bringing people into something larger. One film we studied was Speaking in 
Tongues, which deals with issues of secondary languages in schools. Their campaign 
attempted to raise awareness of the importance of bilingualism through community 
screenings, educational distribution, and community action. In other words, they 
explicitly imagined and positioned their film as a tool for social change 

There are upsides and downsides to the film’s potential life as a film that being subsumed 
to a larger cause comes with. The assumed downside is that grassroots energy is going 
somewhere other than to the film’s success itself. In perhaps too ideal a world, a film 
would be worth supporting just as a film – or perhaps that is too cynical a world, in which 
films can’t stand up on their own artistic merits. Narrative films, especially, can endow 
audiences with real affection because they can come at a fictional world with more of 
their own projected meaning and significance. But especially in the documentary space, 
films have been a successful organizing tool for a very long time. Also, social issue films 
(of which there are more documentaries than fiction films) inherently have a sense of 
urgency and refer to topical things that lend themselves to a campaign-like structure: this is a problem and we need to mount an effort to solve it.

This campaign-like structure also lends itself to a real difference in fiscal support. Of the film projects successfully supported on Kickstarter, 80% are social issue documentaries; filmmakers benefit from the sense on the funder’s part that they are contributing to both a cause and a film.

Finally, another upside of films with external action campaigns is that they do achieve something inherently measurable. You can measure what impact a film had – for example, the BritDoc Impact Reports for the nominees of their PUMA BritDoc Awards. The producers of The Visitor know that their efforts trained 2500 immigration lawyers, who helped 10,000 detainees (read more here).

In a world where the perception of a film’s success is muddled by distributors who want nothing less than to tell you how a film really performed, these metrics mean something. They say: this film did something.

An article we studied compared two different films, one from each of these different 
categories, to illustrate this point: We Were Here, a documentary about HIV awareness, 
and a romantic comedy titled Henry’s Crime. Although both films apply similar 
grassroots methods by reaching out to core constituency groups to help promote the 
film, We Were Here had a much more successful distribution run. The issue of HIV 
awareness generated a sense of urgency that motivated supporters and advocacy groups 
to spread the message of the film. In contrast, even though Henry’s Crime tried similar 
grassroots tactics like reaching out to the fans of stars in the movie to help promote, there was less urgency surrounding the romantic comedy, and the film flopped (more here).

FILM AS SOCIAL ACTION

The sweet spot—the place where the aims of politics and film meet perfectly for a 
grassroots film campaign – is a film that achieves its external political action goals by
showing the film. The recent example is The Act of Killing, where the political act of the 
film was to show it in as many places as possible in Indonesia. Here the success of the 
film as a tool and as a film are one and the same. (Then there are some who dress up a 
film that just wants to succeed in the prestige circles or the marketplace as if it has higher ambitions. See: Harvey Weinstein framing Silver Lining Playbook as a catalyst for 
discussion about mental illness. See also: our eyes rolling).

What's key here is information sharing: if you know what your film means to your audience, you can use existing campaign models to do some of the strategy work for you. There are case studies out there - lots on Josh and Michael's blog here on the CRI site - that can help you get your film to the right audiences better, faster, stronger. 

Talk back! Share your film campaign story and we'll highlight it in an upcoming post here or on Facebook!

#TBT - Grassroots Distribution: Defining Grassroots

Last week, we revisited Josh Penn and Michael Gottwald's white paper on Grassroots Distribution to look at the challenges posed by "grassroots distribution." This week, we take one more step back to define what "grassroots" means, especially in the context of independent filmmaking. 

We got close to a definition by remembering Josh and Michael's claim that, "in order for that film to stay alive, it needs to be supported by constant work, strategy, effort, enthusiasm on the part of the filmmaker and the filmmaker's team," but that is just the beginning. 

For most people, and for Josh and Michael initially, grassroots has well, roots, in community organizing as well as social and political movements. In order to make more sense of an elusive term, Josh and Michael interviewed Jeremy Bird, 2012 Obama For America Field Director and student of Marshall Ganz. According to Jeremy, grassroots operations provide:

1. Access to data and information. A surprising first descriptor, but in the context of political campaigns, it makes sense. Before the Obama campaign of 2008, campaign workers did not have access to the information they do today, which makes the 2008 phenomenon as much about the technology that was suddenly available as it was about a sea change in enthusiasm about a candidate.
2. Real responsibility and goals at the local level. In other words, a palpable sense of accountability. Trusting that the larger goal would be met not by a few leaders at the very top of a hierarchy, but by each ground-level operation spread across the map doing its part to meet its own goal. And by endowing people present at that ground level with responsibility.
3. The ability to scale and make your campaign accessible. Going off of the last descriptor, this means that you can take the campaign anywhere. It is not tied to some antiquated or traditional geographic centers of power. It is nimble and can move, engaging people wherever it is. 
4. A fundamental belief that volunteers can change the outcome. All of this grassroots, community organizing bluster is just a phony brand that is not worth applying unless you actually do subscribe to the belief that a volunteer force—someone there not motivated by wages—can move the needle towards your goal. With self-distribution of films, volunteers may be all you have available, so it’s a definite they would make a difference.

What does this mean for independent filmmakers? It could be as re-simply stated as:

1. Access to data and information. Build a web presence: website, social media, available press. Apply Google analytics. Find out where your audience is and make sure you stay in touch with them. Find out how much it costs to do that, and be sure to use your resources efficiently. Knowing where your audiences are and where your money goes enables you, the filmmaker, to make advantageous partnerships with people who can and want to help you get your movie out there. 
   • Caveat: Data is hard to come by. Check out Colin Whitlow's writings about his Film Finance Index and quest for data transparency, and keep an eye out for a larger industry demand for better reporting to independent filmmakers. 
2. Real responsibility and goals at the local level. Assemble a team of people to support your film in myriad ways - on set, in the community, online, in the press. Trust those people to "spoke out" from your film's story to find access points and alignments across media channels and audience influencers. 
3. The ability to scale and make your (film) accessible. Bring your film to the people to help your career grow! Stewart Thorndike did this with LYLE - she released a feature for free to raise money and awareness for her next feature and it worked! Check out her interview with producer Alex Scharfman here and here. 2014 CRI Fellow Artel Great is also following this principle by bringing multicultural films to multicultural audiences via the Project Catalyst mobile app!
4. A fundamental belief that volunteers can change the outcome. Make your audience your advocates! Stewart did this by converting her free-to-watch LYLE audience to PUTNEY backers. The BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD team made the immediate community the first audience and the strongest advocates. FORT TILDEN's small, committed crew converted their pride in the film into broad buzz across personal networks, creating a loosely-connected but consistently passionate conversation around the film. As Josh and Michael write, "The extent to which a grassroots entity is successful as such depends not on the fulfillment of these basic characteristics but rather on how each entity or person involved is respected, empowered, included, and, in turn, takes ownership of their part in expanding the movement."

Remember: "The structure of a grassroots entity takes the form of the Snowflake Model, with each module of organized activities both an extension from another and its own center of many others." Don't be afraid of branching out beyond your film and its narrative. A film can be many things to many people. 

ChemStuff

Cargo Collective

alk back! Have you applied these principles to your own work? What do you do to motivate the communities (paid/unpaid, professional/bystander, etc.) around your film?

#TBT - Grassroots Distribution: The Challenge of Indie Film Distribution

Over the next two months, we'll be re-releasing Josh Penn and Michael Gottwald's white paper on Grassroots Distribution in targeted installments. This #tbt, we revisit some fundamental thoughts and challenges posed by independent film distribution and explored by Josh & Michael. 

Some thoughts to start with:

• "If film lives online and online content is shared, then these days anyone who sends such content via email, a social network, or a blog is, in a way, a film distributor. But how do you mediate that process to build enthusiasm about a film in a smart, strategic, grassroots way?"
• "...distribution is not the finish line of an independent film's process, but rather just the third act... or even the beginning of a film's life."
• "And, in order for that film to stay alive, it needs to be supported by constant work, strategy, effort, enthusiasm on the part of the filmmaker and the filmmaker's team."

CRI Mentor James Belfer noted, in a conversation with the CRI, the paramount importance of finding and cultivating an audience in the current independent film distribution climate, which requires that filmmakers know their audiences not only to get a film seen to but to get subsequent films financed. It's not unlike a market-research requirement that a venture capitalist fund might deliver to an entrepreneur, a comparison James drew on his blog last year:

A true EP should be viewed just as the startup world views VCs. We need to be an integral part of the indie film venture. We need to be the ones looking out for the financial success of the film. We need to be the ones capable of assessing the overall value of the film and strategizing its monetization.

Knowing your audience helps you to determine your best strategy and the best use of your (presumably) limited resources.

Similarly, MBA/MFA and 2012 CRI alumnus Ryan Heller and BAD TURN WORSE director Zeke Hawkins detailed, in a Grad Film Chair's Workshop co-hosted by the CRI, the necessity of a film's advocacy network and support system. Ryan noted how important it is for filmmakers to think of their relationships with distributors as partnerships, wherein filmmakers leverage the access and capabilities of the distributor while constantly advocating for the project, and actively working towards its positioning in the marketplace. Zeke shared his epiphany that a film's marketing comes in non-traditional forms, such as in the enthusiastic support of casting directors who present a film to the talent industry in a way that can elevate its credibility and contribute to its top-of-mind positioning. Informed and passionate casting directors, talent, local crew, invested vendors, etc. can all help independent filmmakers in their distribution efforts. 

Finding, engaging, and maintaining an audience is a central problem of independent film distribution and hard work, but Josh and Michael see an opportunity in the vastness of the independent film audience "market:"

Film... is inherently a thing that many people can endow with many different meanings, that a huge cross-section of people can appreciate from a multitude of angles and for a plethora of various reasons.

Just like then-candidate Barack Obama, they note, audiences connect with films in myriad, sometimes even conflicting ways. Find out what your film means to people, and bring it to the people who care. How? Check in next week for more insights and tips on Grassroots Distribution, or read ahead in the

Talk back! Tell us what you wish you knew in your first meeting with a distributor.