Group Member: Mike Sullivan's Contribution

The majority of Mike's contribution dealt with the technical/electronic forms of promtoion. Mike created a Gmail account for the group very early on in the process. The name is: ProdigalSonsGroup@gmail.com. This account was used for sending out promotional emails and creating this blog on Google. Mike wrote the following base letter for the emails in order to make sending multiple emails a simpler, more efficient task:

Dear insert organization name,

I, insert member name, am a volunteer at the Florida Film Festival for the 2009 year. Your organization is of particular relevance in relation to one of this year's chosen Feature Films. The film is entitled Prodigal Sons. The film deals directly with your organization's cause by tackling the topic of insert related topic. We would be very appreciative if you would allow us to post flyers/make an announcement/etc. in or around one of your meetings/buildings/establishments.
The Festival runs from March 27th through April 5th at the Regal in Winter Park as well as the Enzian Theater in Maitland. The showings for Prodigal Sons are on the following date:
Saturday, March 28th at 4:45pm (Regal Winter Park)
Tuesday, March 31st at 9:30pm (The Enzian Theater)
The film's official website is www.prodigalsonsmovie.com. Any and all cooperation and support you are willing to offer is greatly appreciated. Please feel free to let us know any concerns you may have. Thank you for taking the time to consider our request. We will be in touch.

Sincerely,
insert group member name
Prodigal Sons Group

The emails were well received with some contacts passing the information to their respective groups that correlate with the film's subject matter. However, multiple responses were received by individuals that expressed deep interest in the film, asking whether it would be shown at later dates. The problem here was that the emails the group sent were during many local school's spring break and therefore the word could not be spread about the film. In the future, our group would instead look into the contact's yearly calendar to avoid this obstacle.
Mike Created a FaceBook event for the second showing of the film. Each group member then proceeded to invite everyone they knew on FaceBook, but to no avail. The event only had about 12 confirmed guests out of some hundred. The "maybe"s and "not attending" more or less split evenly the remaining people invited, though the "maybe"s likely were really just friends who didn't want to decline entirely. Overall, this apsect was far from a success.
Perhaps the most time consuming aspect of Mike's work took place creating the blog imagery and the blog itself. The blog was originallly created with the hope of referring visitors to the site via FaceBook and/or MySpace ads. The lack of a budget prevented the blog from serving this particular purpose. However, the blog imagery Mike created was used as the group's main flyer, which again, referred people to the blog itself for further information. This became a necessity because of the non-existent marketing materials that were never sent to the Enzian. The flyer and blog contained info such as showt imes and the number to call for tickets as can be seen above.
In addition to these tasks, Mike promoted before screenings with Rene by wearing his backwards shirt, handing out flyers to pedestrians, and distributing flyers to various shops including a Chocolate shop in Winter Park and a Pizzeria, amongst others. Mike volunteered for one last task in creating the PowerPoint (and now this blog post) for the group's final presentation. Imagery for the PowerPoint was taken from online, as well as provided for by group members. These tasks are only the individual tasks, as the entire group met on multiple occasions to work together.