How to Plan and Promote Movie Events
Swank recently met up with Ryan, Maddie and Angelle from the University of New Orleans’ Student Activities Council (SAC) at NACA 2018 to talk about how their school uses movies on campus to create fun events for all students.
“We program a lot of different movies on campus because they’re just a very easy, accessible event,” stated Ryan, Student Activities Council president. “Students like to see different things and go to different experiences, so having different immersive events can really make a movie program successful.”
“We have our outdoor amphitheater so students can bring blankets and lawn chairs. We have our Olympic sized swimming pool so we can do a dive-in movie. Or even sometimes to mix it up, we’ll do a drive-in movie where we’ll rope off an entire parking lot and set up a big blow up screen,” explains Maddie, the treasurer and communications coordinator for the SAC.
“A lot of the time when we’re planning a movie-based event, it’ll have a theme around it. We’ve [organized] a dive-in movie where we screened ‘Finding Dory’ by the pool. But if we don’t have a specific theme we’re going with, we put out polls on social media like Twitter and Facebook to try to get a feel for what students want to see,” Ryan notes. According to Angelle, who’s in charge of advertising for the Student Activities Council, students like participating in movie polls “because then they get to feel like they’re a part of planning it.”
“Students like to see different things and go to different experiences so having different immersive events can really make a movie program successful.” Ryan, Student Activities Committee President for the University of New Orleans
Maddie added that movie events are great for any student demographic, and they provide an easy way for students to hang out with their friends and make some new ones. Angelle noted, “We do them a lot during the first week of school. We call it ‘Welcome Back.’ A lot of the students end up joining the same organizations on campus, going Greek together or joining student activities councils, so it’s a great networking program.”
To promote their movie events, the SAC uses social media blasts on the most popular social channels including Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter. Because more than 30 percent of the University of New Orleans' student population consists of commuter students, they have unique method of targeting this harder-to-reach demographic. “Our parking tickets are yellow on campus, so I print out yellow flyers and I place them on the cars. When they see it, they realize it’s not a parking ticket. It’s SAC saying ‘come to our event,’” explains Angelle. The university also lets the SAC send out email blasts so all undergrad students, graduate students and staff are aware of the movie events.
The SAC also relies heavily on promotional materials from Swank. “We’ll hang the posters in the Deck, which is our on-campus cafeteria, along with a sign that has the date and the time,” stated Ryan. “We also reach a lot of other organizations with Swank’s [promotional materials]. We take pictures of [them] and post [them] in our GroupMe chats so Greek Life and [student government] are all getting it too,” added Angelle.
When asked what it’s like to work with Swank, Maddie said, “We do movies at least three or four times a year and always use Swank.” Angelle chimed in to say. “It’s really cool that we get to do such a big event and it wouldn’t have been possible without the movies that Swank provides for us.”
For more information about how to make your own amazing movie program, browse our planning resources, promotional resources or our customer stories for ideas, inspiration and tips. Interested in telling us about your existing movie program? Share your story or give us a call at 1-800-876-5577 to chat.