Host a Screening

Lots! It may be easier than you’d imagine though, especially if you recruit a team to help.

When you host a screening, you are organizing the event. It’s your event, so it’s up to you to choose the date, time, venue, partners, team and other details, then promote it within your community and coordinate the event the day of.

While some people do all the organizing themselves, we recommend putting a team together to help with planning, promotion, and most definitely support the day-of. Local veg-friendly animal, environmental or health organizations make great partners too and might be able to lend support and volunteers–a big plus!

Where can you not!?! You can host one at your local library, local university, independent movie theater, yoga or dance studio, food co-op, café, comedy club, place of worship, or even in your own living room–really, any place that has room for people to sit and the audio visual equipment you need. For a larger crowd, you’ll want a projector, screen, dvd player (can be a DVD player on a laptop), and the cords to connect everything. If the space is large or if you have a softspoken host or guest speaker, consider using a microphone to welcome people, introduce the film, and answer questions at the end. If you’re in a theater or other large space, feel free to get another microphone to pass around to audience members for Q&A questions.

The screening kit contains two copies of the DVD and a license to show the film publicly.

As you’ll see on our site, it depends on the estimated audience size and whether or not you plan to show the film more than once.

For up to 24 seats:

• with a one-time screening license: $35
• with an unlimited screenings license: $50

For 25–100 seats:

• with a one-time screening license: $50
• with an unlimited screenings license: $100

For over 100 seats:

• with a one-time screening license: $100
• with an unlimited screenings license: $250

Yep! With appropriate planning, you’ll be happy to see the kit’s cost coming back to you. Here are just a few ideas to cover your event budget, and maybe even have moolah left over so that your time and energy are covered:

• Charge admission
• Find a local vegan-friendly sponsor who wants publicity for his/her products or services in the community and will chip in for the kit in exchange for some promotion
• Get a team of volunteers or a vegan-friendly eatery or company to donate some food or snacks to give for free to bring added value to the cost of a screening ticket or to sell in addition to the screening ticket. (The dinner-and-a-movie model has proven very successful at past screenings.)
• Buy a DVD bundle in our e-store and sell DVDs at retail price at your event
• Apply to VegFund for a reimbursement of your expenses

Yes again! Compared to other documentaries, you’ll see our prices are super duper low. Believe it or not, the money goes towards recouping our film production costs. (The average documentary costs $350,000 to make–ouch!). If you’re not sure what to do with those extra two DVDs we’ll send as part of the screening kit, feel free to sell them at retail price ($23.99) at your screening. That’s more than the cost of a $35 screening kit recouped right there. Booyah! Or you can raffle them off at the event.

We encourage people to buy a regular DVD or watch for as little as $2.99 through digital portals to preview the movie for their needs. DVDs are available through our site, Amazon.com, and other online retailers.

The movie is not rated. It does include explicit language and some graphic footage of factory farming and the like. We recommend viewers be at least in high school. Like an R-rated movie, though, it’s ultimately up to a parent.

Please do! We’d love to support organizations that do great work. We just ask that the organization you choose not exploit animals or promote animal products. If you’re not sure, shoot us an email, and we’ll look into it.

Vegan companies make perfect sponsors. Your audience is their target demographic. If you don’t have a vegan sponsor, perhaps there’s a local business such as a veg-friendly restaurant, health food store, or yoga studio that might benefit from being exposed to your audience. At Vegucated screenings, food sponsors have been super popular. Serving delicious vegan food at your event is always a draw, but coupons work too, as do door or raffle prizes. Feel free to put that creative hat on to see how you and your sponsor can benefit mutually from the event.

What’s in it for sponsors besides exposure to the people who are there? Well, exposure to everyone you invite to the screening. Feel free to add their name and web link to any invitations you send out online. When you market the event on Facebook and Twitter, include shout outs to them and tag them if they have Twitter accounts or Facebook pages.

We ask folks to be mindful around sponsor language, as we already have national sponsors, including Mary’s Gone Crackers, who is supplying samples to domestic screenings, plus So Delicious, and Obsessive Confection Disorder, who have supplied viewers with product and/or coupons.

Great question. We recommend you think about your goal. Is it to recoup costs or to bring attention to the issue or to a veg-friendly charity? Or both? You know your community best, but we’ve had luck pricing near local movie theater prices when we have free food and/or a panel afterwards. Of course, you could also have a suggested donation amount to accommodate various viewers’ budgets.

It might be useful to do a budget for all cash costs (venue, eats, drinks, screening license, speaker(s) expenses, etc.). Then add 15% to that, because sometimes, well, things happen, and you need to make more photocopies, etc. And then divide that amount over the number of seats you think you can fill.

We strongly suggest pricing tickets bought online or at the door day of the screening a good $2+ higher. That’s to help people to decide earlier on if they’re coming so you can see how much more event promoting needs to happen, and offer a deal to those who want or need one.

Some movie theaters and event spaces will have their own policy/box office for ticket sales.

We’ve enjoyed using EventBrite to sell advanced tickets online and to check viewers in at the door. Of the many things we like about it, you can use their mobile phone app to scan tickets or check people off the ticket buyers list. EventBrite also allows you to reserve comp tickets if you need to keep a close eye on your seat count.

If you decide to use EventBrite, please use this link for Vegucated to receive credit! Again, we recommend selling tickets for a slightly higher price at the door or online on the day of the event to encourage people to buy tickets in advance so they’re more likely to attend and so you have a more accurate sense of how your marketing is going.

If you are combining your screening with a special event such as a vegan dinner or dessert reception with your panelists or other special guests, you may consider offering an additional deluxe package that costs more and includes the fancy pants experience.

On the day of the event, we encourage you to have cash on hand to make change for people who buy tickets at the door. To take credit cards on site for selling tickets and/or DVDs, we recommend Square. It’s fun, compatible with an iDevice + WiFi and fits in your pocket! If you order it 2-3 weeks ahead of time, they will mail one for free. Or you can pick one up at an Apple store for $9.99 with a rebate for the same amount. Note that Square will keep 2.75% of all credit card-swiped transactions.

Fine by us!

Hm. It depends on the scale of your event. Our experience says you’ll need one to four people to check people in via EventBrite; one to take cash or credit cards via Square at the door, and two for food samples if applicable. If you’re selling DVDs afterwards, you can recycle two of your check-in volunteers for this purpose.

The eternal question! Rest assured knowing that if there are people who care about animals, the environment or health in your community, people will come to your screening as long as they know about it, and it’s not at midnight on a Monday…unless the club scene is part of your target demographic and if so, please take lots of pictures for us.

Make it an Event

The more value you can add to the event, the better. And the more you can turn it into a community event, the better. Experts are a draw, as are food and prizes. So are dancing girls and guys. But we digress…

We recommend partnering with a local veg business or local animal, environmental or health organization who can reach out to their mailing list and community on your behalf. Organizations will be more motivated to market for you if you ask them to table at your event, ask a representative to be a speaker on the panel after the event and/or offer to turn the event into a fundraiser for them, where they share in any profits from the event. There are lots of ways to partner with an org that will help gets tushies in seats, awareness raised, and good karma spread all around.

Other potential panelists who could reach out to their community for marketing the event might include local leaders and experts such as vegan authors, chefs or restaurant owners, vegan-friendly nutritionists or MDs, environmental or animal law professors, local veg TV or radio personalities, vegan athletes, vegan acrobats, etc. (You might have to take out extra insurance for the acrobat part.)

If You Feed Them, They Will Come

The words “free” and “food” are an instant draw, especially when used together. You can offer free vegan food, turn it into a dinner or potluck, or offer a special schmancy dessert reception for an extra price. Feel free to get creative.

Submitting to Press

The press is your friend. They want to feature cool community events, and you’ll have one to provide. Win-win! With a month or more lead time before the event, we recommend you submit the movie to calendar listings in appropriate local papers from the smallest to the largest. Feel free to send out a press release to local newspapers, magazines, websites, prominent blogs, radio stations, and TV news channels. You can pull language from our website about our film festival awards and what veg leaders are saying about the film. If local media would like to use stills from the film, please point them to our Facebook photo album Images from the Film or to the higher resolution stills page on our site.

Social Media

Facebook invites make inviting your friends so easy. Encourage them to help you spread the word, tweet it out, make a FB contest for people who repost the invite, etc. Maybe the winner gets free tickets to your event or a prize? Please note that you must RSVP “join” or “maybe” to the FB invitation yourself before you can invite others. We encourage you to tag us in status updates about the event. We’ll post the FB invite on our page as well.

We’d love nothing more than to be there! Between two producers, the writer-director, the three main film stars and the many experts who appear throughout the film, you will have plenty of special guests who might be able to make a guest appearance and help with Q&A at the end. Most of us are based in NYC, so for screenings outside the city, we ask that travel costs be covered as well as a small stipend for that person’s time, plus a hotel or a home stay if necessary. If travel isn’t an option, we might be able to organize a Skype chat with one of the filmmakers or film stars.