Remain a business meeting place: facilitate online appointments for your film market
Most festivals are currently forced to adopt a hybrid form. Besides their regular and online program, they have turned the complete professional (industry and film market) program into a virtual event. After all, a film festival also remains a place where contacts are made, and business bonds forged. But, when your festival is online or hybrid, how do you facilitate meetings between your professional guests?
With the film market scheduler module in Fiona, you can already use the meeting planner. Through online forms, you can request your professional guests to enter their availability and to set with which projects or guests they’d like to meet. Based on everybody’s availability and preferences, Fiona calculates who meets who when and where. And the best thing: you can control the algorithm for how to automatically plan these meetings. This is how a reliable meeting program is created, with full control but without doing all the puzzling yourself. The only thing is, in times of social distancing and travel restrictions, it is quite hard or even impossible to meet in real life. So, there has to be an alternative.
In cooperation with DOK Leipzig, a German documentary and animated film festival, we developed that alternative: an online meeting planner. Read on to learn how Fiona can help you facilitate online appointments, either 1-on-1 meetings, round table, or pitches, between your professional guests.
1. Set the way your festival will facilitate appointments
How will your festival facilitate appointments? Set up your meeting scheduler for online, on location, or a combination of both. An online or hybrid schedule will take account of all different time zones automatically.
2. Set how your guest will participate
When you set up a hybrid schedule, your guests will have to set whether they will be solely online or physically present at your festival. When they will join your event virtually, they have to enter their timezone. Everybody fills out their availability (in their timezone or at the festival) during your market, which Fiona then uses for planning.
3. Set the algorithm and start planning
After collecting everybody’s availability and meeting requests, you can start the automated planner. This feature will plan all meeting requests as appointments based on priorities, availability, and preferences. You can run the automated planner several times during the process. Moreover, you are in control of the algorithm on how to plan these meetings – meeting requests of VIP guests first? Mutual requests second? You can decide for yourself what suits your market best. Of course, you can also plan meetings manually or tweak the auto-planned appointments to your liking.
4. Provide a secure, stable meeting place for appointments
All meetings with people in different time zones will become online meetings. To host these, Fiona has a connection with Jitsi to automatically create meeting rooms for each appointment. Logged in with a MyFestival account, guests can access all the meetings planned for them.
Meeting other professionals at the DOK's online industry program
In this 63rd edition of DOK Leipzig, the organization decided that their film market and industry program will go fully digital. Meaning that all meetings between projects and professional guests and other networking events will take place online. Besides, those who are accredited can join all other events, presentations, and expert talks with their personal account on the festival platform myDOK.
The German festival for documentary and animated films will be up and running from October 26th until November 1st.
Not able to make it to Leipzig? Watch a selection of their program online.
Let's get in touch
As a conclusion, we would like to mark the fact that Fiona hopes to contribute to the well-being of film festivals and their very important role of the connector. With this new feature, we hope to give all participants the same chances as they would have had when they physically show up on a film market.
Our online project meeting planner in short:
- Set up your scheduler for online, on location, or hybrid meetings
- Request how your guest will participate: physical or online
- Determine the algorithm and start planning
- Fiona provides a secure, stable meeting place for all online appointments
Would you like to know more about how Fiona can help your festival? Please, contact us!
