Premieres, Premieres, Premieres

We have been working on premieres for our summer programming, among other things, for California Voices. My specific role was to create the promotional flyers and postcards. A byproduct was putting the new design for the programs on T-Shirts we ended up giving out to the students who participated in the program.

Our biggest challenge we ran into was we wanted to do a six hour premiere with 2 hours going to each of the three parts of the CA Voices Initiative. We didn't schedule a venue soon enough to hold all three programs so we ended up having to split up into separate venues, dates and times. This afforded us to have more targeted marketing though, with our Hmong Voices Film Premiere being promoted on a Hmong language heavy TV channel, newspaper and making the front page of the online edition of the city newspaper. We filled up the venue and it was a great success with over 100 people for the first film premiere we've done in the Sacramento area. Our Latino Voices Film Premiere will be at a local latino club and will have cultural performances and our Native Voices Film Premiere will be the featured entertainment at a regionally and culturally prestigious banquet in December.

I have also been working with the youth entrepreneurship aspect of our organization, the Youth Empowerment Studio. Using a youth development model to create a safe place for teens to learn we have about 30 youth between our two offices. A planning meeting this weekend helped flesh out what the students in our office would like to learn and provide to clients throughout this next year: media conversion, trainings for other non-profits and businesses, videos and some graphic design/web design.

The biggest challenge I've faced with the organization is getting them to use industry standard software. Its a big expense, but its all about the perceived expertise of the youth and us. If we are using Adobe software and are Adobe or Apple certified, other organizations and businesses will perceive us as more qualified and more able to provide technical support, which seems to be the direction they want to go.

Finally, I am creating a communication survey to understand how we as an organization process information flow and creation. From this I will be better able to recommend equipment purchases and further training/ certification we need to undergo.

That's it for now. Attached is a postcard for our Latino Voices Film Premiere.

Comment from Dan Stangl on November 16, 2009 - 8:32pm

Rich,

Big props on the success of your film premiere. Coordinating one event like that, let alone three, is challenging, so, again, much credit for the great job on promotion and getting the local media involved. The use of industry standard software can be kind of contentious in non-profits, especially as you mentioned for cost reasons, but especially if you're running workshops with youth its usually worth it to splurge on better software to create a skill set that can translate outside the workshop. Hope everything goes well for the Our Latino Voices Film Premiere, the postcard looks great.

Dan