Contest Winner Announced! Most Innovative Audience-Building and Fundraising Tactics Revealed

Congratulations to Jon Bonnell - winner of "The Conversation" FREE Ticket challenge:

In 50 Words of Less, explain the most innovative audience-building and fundraising tactic for film.

Jon has won a FREE ticket ($150 value) to The Conversation.  Check out Jon's and the other top ideas below... ideas that all filmmakers can be using.  Thanks to everyone who participated.  Keep up the DIWO!

WINNER: Jon Bonnell

"Build an avid, involved fan base that promote for you: Example, we recently ran a campaign through Twitter with our loyal fans who were already subscribed to our Twitter feed. The campaign involved offering access to a free screening of our new film. All our fans needed to do was send out a public @reply saying that they wanted to see it.  In doing so, information was sent on our film to all of their followers... viral advertising.  We doubled our Twitter subscriber base in a week AND our fans got to see our film.  They got to provide great feedback and reviews as well.  Win-Win all the way around."

OTHER TOP IDEAS:

Simone
"Create an online work-in-progress screening complete with Q & A and questionnaire via streaming.  Donors and audience can view the work-in-progress clips/scenes from the film and provide input/ideas/thoughts to filmmaker(s).  This [access] personally invests donors/audiences to become a part of the exciting "process" of filmmaking and in the eventual finished product in a consulting capacity as fan/friend/"member of the team."  This is a new form of interactive/social networking/audience-building for filmmakers so their work-in-progress screenings are not just local, but on-line and worldwide!"

Patrick
"Create the film preview.  Send people out to play the preview on portable video players on public transportation for a day in 10 cities.  Videotape yourself.  Get direct advertising to a full day's worth of bored commuters in the most lucrative markets then distribute the recorded spectacle to everyone else."

NoRestrictions
"Feature a role for a fan in your movie: Create a video about the contest and broadcast  it to fans on social network sites.  Rules: Fan must become a friend of the project, name the person who referred and submit a video audition. The winner and referring fan get a featured role in your film."

Mabel 
"Shoot a video pitch showing viewers what your project is about and post it to viral outlets relevant to your film/content.  Use this video pitch to fundraise through places like IndieGoGo and show it at a fundraiser party+screening done through Brave New Theatres. People who give you money or in-kind are featured in the next update of your video pitch, this creates a buzz and more people start donating."

crabjuicer
"Strategy 1. Upload to top 10 video hosting sites. 2. Create accounts with top 10 social sites for bookmarking, digg/stumbleupon/etc or networking, myspace/facebook/etc. 3. Promote aforementioned video links on blogs, message boards, etc. and submit the pages with film promotion to aforementioned social sites, with proper keywords."

jptang
"Have audience vote on how movie ends while watching the movie, using hand-held clickers. Majority rules."    

Comments

[Jon Bonnell]

Thank you so much for the recognition. Our fans really deserve the credit for making this all happen! I was at the DIY conference in LA and really wish I could attend this conference as well, but I am meeting with distributors.

Check out our film, MATCH.DEAD at our official page:
http://www.matchdotdead.com

and pay us a visit to our IMDB page:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1218507/

[Sunny]

Congratulations !