Time for some trumpet-blowing. The Sydney Irish Film Festival, held last weekend, was a rip-roaring success, and the opening night saw a packed house sit down to watch Kings, a bleak but honest rendering of the Irish in London, back in the day when we were diggers and labourers rather than IT consultants and property portfolio managers.
Not to get bogged down in it, a bunch of six Irish lads leave the Gaeltacht in 1977 to find their fortunes. One does, the rest don’t, but all keep their admirable pact of only speaking Irish to each other when they’re together, making it the first Irish-language feature film I’d ever seen.
The festival seems to have gone extremely well, helped along by a simple festival website created through WordPress on the smell of an oily rag. With the festival approaching, the absence of a website became worrying and with our own clunker being re-done, we asked our very competent IT consultants to tag on a Film Festival site to the job.
We were quoted $3,000 to create a professional one, but with the festival being essentially an inaugural community event only running over four days, it wasn’t deemed a sensible expense when all we needed was brief synopses of the films and a link to the Chauvel cinema site, which took care of ticketing.
I suggested the idea of using a free blog to do up the site, did a mock-up within 15 minutes, and the boss was sold on the idea. Our graphics guy did the banner, I coached the boss in how to manipulate the blog software (which we’ll be using on our newspaper’s blogs soon anyway) and off we went.
The result is admittedly crude, without the flash trappings of a professionally-written site, but for a small not-for-profit event it helped us keep costs down and did the job admirably. Some trickery with page parents, etc, allowed us list the films in the sidebar, and you’d be amazed what trailers, etc, can be found to flesh the site out.
Costs were limited to the $10 paid to WordPress for domain name registration, plus the A$50 to resigter irishfilmfestival.org.au
Sixty bucks.
It meant we could spend more putting ads into the mainstream media to boost its profile. We had a freelancer work on sending out press releases, and hit our email database with a newsletter directing them to the site.
It worked.
We registered more than 1,300 hits on Saturday alone, and an average of 775 hits per day during the festival. Several movies sold out, and it seems our not-for-profit event, thankfully, was a not-for-loss event also.
While using a blog for something like this is constricting, if you’re willing to spend a bit of time figuring out how to maximise the available widgets and options, it can be put to best use. Use your own resources wisely (i.e. email database, contacts lists, etc.) and you can maximise the efficiency. We could have done a whole lot more if we had more time to play with, and we will do next year – probably in a more professional manner.
Meanwhile, keep an eye on www.irishecho.com.au for a big change in the pipeline.
