How to get sponsors for your documentary- This video is a step by step guide on how to raise funding for your Film or Documentary.
I was able to raise over 30K in Sponsorships, Crowdfunding and online sales for my Documentary.
Contents of this video:
00:00 Intro
00:39 Documentary topic
02:51 Social Media & Web
04:24 Build your Following
06:48 Crowdfunding
09:20 Sponsorship for your Documentary
11:14 Merchandising
Is it a trending topic? Can you easily access your audience? Do they have facebook pages? Are there influencers that you can reach out to? Are their podcasts you can go on? And how can you get involved within this community and offer value?
Create Social media accounts and Website
Your next step is creating social media accounts and a website for your film. This is very crucial for the next steps in this video so spend your time on these and really polish them up because at the end of the day this is what people are going to know you as before your project is released.
If you are able to actually get people to go to either one of your social media accounts or websites you have to be able to capture their attention and more importantly a way to contact them, from their email or getting a follow from them to keep them updated!
Build a following within the niche or topic of your Documentary.
At the peak of the Law of the goat IG account it had 12K followers and as we all know having a following and numbers behind your project is power!
Now to grow that fast we were posting minimum 2 times a day 5 days a week, this would be snippets of the footage we shot, Behind the scenes videos and photos and updates of what we were doing and how the project was evolving.
But the the advice to anyone just starting out is create a system that way every time you film and organize your footage you can put together 8-15 second snippets of what you shot. Try to get someone to film you or your team in production.
Your goal is to create as much content as possible. Reach out to people in your community and engage with them ask them questions and who knows you might have someone repost something and blow your project up.
Crowdfunding
When you feel like you have a strong following and you have a voice in the community its then time to start thinking about crowdfunding.
You will waste your time and money if you try to crowdfund before you build your audience.
In regards to crowdfunding there are a few great sites like Kickstarter, Indiegogo and Seed & spark, Seed & Spark is solely for the purpose of raising capital for film.
If you are having trouble thinking about a topic for your film or you're wondering if your idea has an audience I would check out some of the
listed projects on these sites to see how they're doing and what kind of capital they're raising and that should give you a good indication of what your project could raise on one of these sites.
Sponsorship
Now we're going to talk about sponsorship, now I will say that this is by far the hardest way to raise money for your project and the most time consuming but if you are able to get a sponsor on board for your project that alone can raise anywhere from 5K-100K for a single sponsorship.
Before you get a meeting with a possible sponsor there's a few things that you're going to want to have lined up so you can show your project's value as a marketing tool. Because make no mistake that's exactly what this is to them.
So lets say that you have a growing fanbase on social media, you have a nice website that looks legitimate and shows promise in your project.
You're going to want to create a sponsorship package and what this package needs to clearly breakdown is the deliverables or brand placement that they will receive through your documentary.
This package also needs to breakdown your project what its about and when you plan on releasing your project and where it will be released.
Companies want to know the potential of eyeballs that are going to be on their product or brand so the more information you can bring to the table the more they will feel secure in backing your project.
Now if you guys are interested I can break down exactly how to create, organize and design your sponsorship package. But i need at least 20 comments of people saying Make that video so unless I get that I aint doin it.
Products
The last thing that you can do to raise funding is create products like T-shirts, Posters and any other promotional materials that you can sell online.
I kind of got lucky because I had a sponsor reach out to us saying that they would make all of our T-shirts for free for promotion on our Instagram and Website. So we were able to keep 100% profit on all our T-shirt sales. But even then that only generated a few thousand dollars in revenue and honestly it was time consuming as hell. But sometimes you got to hustle.