The Many Benefits of Staged Fundraising For NonDē Distribution, Marketing, Impact, & Outreach
Chapter 14 Of The HFF INVISIBLE NATION Distribution / NonDē Exploration Case Study
One of my biggest discoveries on INVISIBLE NATION was recognizing how applicable documentary film’s staged financing method (forced as it may be) was to the distribution process, and particularly the NonDē approach.
Documentary filmmaking has long required even more faith in the process than that of other forms of feature filmmaking due to how rare full financing at onset is for nonfiction work. Sure, none of us want to go on any journey without knowing how to reach the final destination, but that is a privilege few in the doc space ever enjoy. NonFiction work has always required coalition building from the onset, and many funders who commit have required proof of concepts before they invest. As the financial returns on nonfiction cinema are rarely the multiples imagined within the fiction sector, competition among nonfiction projects was never so fierce as to push back on this process, and now staged financing for development and production of nonfiction work is fully institutionalized.
Now with the buyers in the doc sector shunning 98% of the films that address issues of democracy, politics, or truth to power, those that dared indulge in the generation of such necessary efforts, have been forced to come up with new and novel ways to put together their release too. It’s that old necessity is the mother nugget again!
Focusing on just the practical limits us to a realm far smaller than we generally deserve. Utopian ideation helps you dream wildly, and the seeds we spawn in the process, help us with the plans that need to be drawn. You want to have extra ideas laying around. Why? Every action is an opportunity to fundraise for the next action. These actions are all possible steps in the further distribution of your film. Just because you are unable to do something now, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it later. As long as audiences are engaging, the more you should be offering them new opportunities; build those plans in advance.
Recognize and embrace growing your community. The more you can do this around your film, you, your process, and then the community itself, the more people you will have to present new opportunities to engagement to. For many this may be simply come down to financial contributions. But don’t neglect the others who have less money to spare; chances are, they have something more important to give.
To stimulate financial contribution, you have to be able to articulate what that money is being used for. You have help them see that vision as a possible future. Production is easier to visualize than distribution or marketing. We understand that production results in a finished product, but is a bit more abstract to understand the results of distribution or marketing. The more you can define each aspect, the more you will be able to raise funds. Once again, this highlights the need for goal setting, and the need for those goals to align with those of your various communities (as we discussed in the last chapter).
There are some nice windfalls to this staged approach too.
I find with most things it is easier when you don’t feel the imperative to do it all at once. Why go nonstop start to finish? That is fast. We are slow. Slow gives birth to new opportunities. When we bring slow into our process, we free ourselves from the trap of the status quo. We get out of our ruts. We can examine — if not actually explore — new terrain.
But before we go deep into the stages of financing the distribution and marketing of INVISIBLE NATION, it would be helpful to take a step back into the NonDē of it all.
NonDē embraces a holistic approach to both the film and the filmmakers’ sustainability within the system. Financing for NonDē has five interlocking realms, and whereas the funding may come specifically for one realm or the other, each affects the other’s success and it is best to see them all woven together.
The five realms of financing in NonDē are:
1. Financing The Project
2. Financing the Marketing & Distribution
3. Financing the Filmmakers’ careers
4. Financing a collective Ecosystem Operational Improvement
5. Providing for the future & NonDē mission statement pledge (build back better and do no harm, transparency, & support)
The key to all of this is the identification not of investors but of potential partnerships. As the investment is not there just for the sake of profit, the entities that help generally have some deeper alignment with the movie, its themes, or the people involved. Partners also look out for each other, and recognize both sides need to get something in return. Recognizing what you can offer a partner will help secure the funding or sponsorship; breaking your distribution up into a series of campaigns will help you better identify what you can provide your partners.
Of course, there is no guarantee that you will be able to raise for each campaign. Funders burn out just like crew. You must continually source new prospects, which is why making each step as social as possible has some benefits. Recognizing that you may not get the chance to do each of them means you have to stay nimble and recognize where the priorities live. Similarly we found that there are several stages that were too difficult to complete in the idealized order. We still haven’t raised funds for versioning even though it would have been ideal to have versions and clips ready for the initial release. We still haven’t raised funds for DVD authoring and manufacture although it would be helpful to have them now.
Had we been able to recognize all of this from the start, we would have done things differently of course, but the concept of NonDē was still in formation. And as much as one may want to, you can’t control how most things happen.
Our distribution fundraising started the day of our first festival screening. We should have begun before we started filming but as we were raising money to complete the film even after that first festival screening, we had some challenges on that front.
We broke it up into stages. While in one stage, we are working to raise for the next two or three stages down the line. What follows is more the ideal flow versus what we did on INVISIBLE NATION, but it is born from what we experienced on that film.
