National Screen Institute: Taking Film Festivals Online

Recreating the social networking magic of a real world film festival online.

Social Media Strategy – The National Screen Institute

After making the tough decision to cancel their annual film festival, The National Screen Institute (NSI) knew they needed an alternative means of promoting Canadian film. They sifted through social media proposals from several Canadian digital media companies, and chose Tactica to conceptualize and produce an online film festival and social networking solution.

Tactica developed a website that helped NSI to:

  • Showcase Canadian film industry talent through an online film festival
  • Promote networking in the film industry through social media
  • Increase NSI training applications and participation
  • Reduce website content creation costs by enabling
    user generated content
  • Connect with a larger audience through popular social networking communities such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube
  • Generate online profit through a sponsorship and banner advertising management system

Features and Technology

Analysis & Project Planning

Tactica conducted a needs assessment for NSI through client and stakeholder interviews, and analysis of existing research. Tactica helped to crystallize NSI’s vision for the project by defining purpose, objectives, major milestones, constraints, assumptions, key roles, timelines, budgets and in depth feature specifications.

Customized Content Management System

A custom CMS enabled NSI to:

  • Have complete website management control
  • Create and edit web pages, events, news, films and other types of content
  • Manage website administrative users and give different levels of permission to content authors
  • Moderate the discussion board

Custom Social Networking Tools

Tactica developed a unique set of social media and networking tools to engage the NSI website users and encourage them to visit the site often. Website users have the ability to:

  • Create a profile and manage privacy controls
  • Comment on the NSI blog
  • Participate in discussions on films and filmmaking
  • Post and respond to announcements
  • Send private messages to other NSI website users
  • Share content with their friends via integrated email, mobile and social media tools
  • Subscribe to NSI updates through RSS feeds

Advertising and Sponsorship Management

This gave NSI the ability to:

  • Manage their online advertising and sponsorship messages
  • Include paid multimedia banner ads on their website
  • Include short video commercials placed before or after films shown in the film festival or other videos
  • Easily target and modify banner ads throughout the site.