Two-Year Operating Support Grant

Duluth Superior Film Festival's goal is to increase year round film programming, marketing and hire a staff member. Measureable outcomes in this field would be to increase presence to the public, create stronger promotional opportunities, increase and solidify year round marketing within social networks, create regional advertisements, website upkeep and analytics tracking, and increase programming with partner organizations. With the staff hire to oversee these activities we intend to increase traffic to the Duluth Superior Film Festival website by 50% in the non-festival months. Increase our Facebook Page Likes and Twitter followers by 20% and increase the number of screenings we present outside of the festival setting to 20/year. The long range outcome is to expand the regional artistic community by producing a quality, entertaining, and thought provoking film festival and ongoing cinema exhibition. An increase in regional productions allows Duluth Superior Film Festival to attempt to screen 15 regionally made productions per year in 2017/18. Our methods to measure outcomes to ascertain goal achievements will be as follows: Monitoring staff hire through board oversight via a 5-point performance management evaluation matrix tool that assesses staff strength in the following categories and subcategories: 1. Organizational Wide Financial Understanding: Financial understanding of organization and ability to constrain this understanding. 2. Organization Wide Competencies: Initiative; Sense of Urgency; Teamwork; Work Environment/Safety. 3. Job Based Competencies: Communication; Audience Focus; Dependability; Job Knowledge; Planning; Productivity; Results Focus; Technical Skills. Marketing and promotional goals will be measured through the use of website analytics and visitor tracking, social networking insight tools which measure page actions, page views, page likes, reach, and post engagements, as well as documenting volume of promotional materials and advertisements at festival and special year round events. We will know that we achieved our goals by seeing an increase in traffic to our website by 50% in the non-festival months, an increase our Facebook page Likes (currently 1,916) and Twitter followers (currently 755) by 20% (Facebook=2,300, Twitter=910). Additionally, logging number of off-festival event screenings with a goal total of 20/year. One per month at venue partners Zinema and American Indian Community Housing Organization. Duluth Superior Film Festival will also solicit feedback, measure enjoyment, evaluate programming and address the needs of our audience via surveys at all events.