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Making Your Documentary Matter:
Outreach and Impact Strategies that Work

Hosted by American University's Center for Social Media
February 7, 2005, 1:00-8:00 p.m.

A workshop for documentary filmmakers on how to make outreach and audience engagement part of the production planning of your documentary. Engagement strategies not only make powerful tools to extend the reach and effectiveness of your documentary, they can also be part of your fundraising plan!

Welcome from Center director Pat Aufderheide
For some of us, it’s not enough to make a great movie. You need to find the viewers who need it, who will use it, who will change their lives and those of others because they made connections that you helped them to make.

That’s where strategies of community engagement come in.

Increasingly, filmmakers are figuring out that the time to do outreach planning is in the first stages of shaping their project, in the pre-production phase. They are also learning that building community engagement in from the start also creates new funding opportunities as they are making their films.

Learn in this one-day workshop from some of the most well-respected professionals in outreach and community engagement, and find out how their strategies helped great documentaries get made, and make a difference in the world.

Click on Schedule to see the panel descriptions and Panelist Bios for more information on the presenting experts. After you have seen the exciting line-up, you can register on the Registration page and find out more about traveling to American University under Travel to DC. We look forward to seeing you, and please email us if you have any questions.

Welcome from Joy Thomas Moore, The Annie E. Casey Foundation
The role of the Foundation in the documentary process has experienced a sea change. It used to be a grant was given to a producer and there were few, if any expectations beyond to make sure it was completed and it got on the air.

Now there is an increasingly loud chorus demanding that a documentary achieve “results” and as Pat Aufderheide says, be a documentary that ‘make a difference in the world.’ The Annie E. Casey Foundation is part of that chorus. We have fully embraced the notion that the production phase is just one of three legs in the media for social change agenda. The other two are outreach and action. That’s when media truly achieves its power.


This workshop is generously made possible by a grant from the:

Also sponsored by:

 

 

 

 

About 2006 Workshop

2005 Schedule

2005 Panelist Bios

2005 Background Materials and Resources

2005 Workshop

 

 
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