National Screen Institute

How could NSI recreate the social networking magic of a real world film festival online?

The Challenge
The National Screen Institute, a nationally recognized not-for-profit film and television training institute, made the difficult decision to cancel its annual film festival. To fill the void NSI focused on redeveloping its website to promote networking and showcase talent within the Canadian film industry. They knew they needed a self-sustaining site that incorporates social networking and user generated content enabled by a host of social media features. Admittedly, they weren’t sure what all that meant. After reviewing proposals from new media agencies across Canada they chose Tactica to guide them towards their vision.

The Solution
Tactica began a detailed needs assessment gathered through in depth interviews with NSI staff and members of their target audience and the analysis of existing research. Following the needs assessment Tactica’s creative and development team put together a robust project plan that crystallized NSI’s vision by clearly stating purpose, objectives, major milestones, constraints, assumptions, key roles, timelines, budgets and in depth feature specifications.

The website is an online platform designed to enhance the services NSI offered to its users, by:

1. Presenting an online film festival featuring the best in Canadian filmmaking

2. Providing multiple online professional development opportunities leading to increased applications to and participation in NSI’s core training programs

3. Providing social networking tools such as personal profiles, blogs, discussion boards, customer feedback mechanisms, private messaging, member news and much more

4. Providing a framework for sponsorship recognition and banner advertising

 

Key features include:

1. Customized Content Management System

The corner stone of the website is a robust ASP.NET driven content management system (CMS) that allows NSI staff to create and edit pages, add events and news, films, and other types of content.  A complete user management and permission system allows content authors to specify the users that will be able to view or edit a specific piece of content. Finally, the built-in workflow system allows the site administrator to grant authoring abilities to users while still retaining control over what appears on the site.

2. Social Networking Tools

The My NSI section forms the core of the site’s social networking strategy. Users are able to create their online profiles while maintaining privacy control over personal information. They can comment on blogs, discuss films and filmmaking, promote their own news posts and read community news from other users, and send private messages to each other.

3. Discussion Board

The discussion board lets users communicate in a familiar message board format and is an essential part of the overall social networking strategy. Tight integration with the commenting and content management features allows NSI staff to automatically cross-post content to the discussion board and provides a unified source for comments. Full moderation features allow NSI to delegate administration duties for specific categories and forums.

4. Ads and Sponsorship

The website supports two forms of sponsorship. The first is paid multimedia banner ads in Flash, GIF, or JPEG format placed within several predefined locations. The second form of advertising includes short video commercials placed before or after films shown in the film festival or other videos. The advertising banner management system allows NSI staff to easily target and modify banner ads throughout the site.

5. Syndication

The syndication and sharing features provide viral marketing methods encouraging and enabling users to promote the site’s content.  Users can submit links to popular social media sites, send pages via email,  and send links to mobile phones via text message. In addition, users can subscribe to content via RSS feeds so that news and updates can be easily distributed to users or even other websites.

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