We recently ran into a great article on No Film School, “Meet the PMD, the Crew Position You Didn’t Know You Needed.” A PMD is Producer of Marketing and Distribution, your advocate for getting the film in front of people. The article circulated around the office in an email, and it seemed to ring true for all of us about something at the heart of the Kindling production model. 

Kindling docs take on a wide variety of subjects — from doulas to homelessness — but the uniting thread is that each doc is part of a wider impact campaign that aims to ignite real, measurable change in the world. From the outset, every film we work on is built into a holistic engagement plan, with an audience in mind and research conducted on the best way to reach them.

Here’s a good example: No Small Matter is a feature film and digital engagement campaign around the issue of access to high quality early childhood education in America. The doc itself won’t be released until 2017, but in the meantime, our production team is building partnerships with key early education advocates and stakeholders, developing a theory of what positive change would look like for this issue, conducting research on our core audience, and launching digital engagement (including social media and a vlog) around the film — even before we’ve got the final script.

 
Because we’ve done the research on our audience, we know, for example, that Pinterest is an important resource for many parents and early childhood educators, just the folks we are trying to reach. We don’t use Pinterest for all of our projects, but for No Small Matter, we built it into the campaign as an essential touch point. We’ve also launched a video blog in response to some of the trends we’re seeing among educators on Youtube. (Want to see how we’re using our social media channels to drive engagement? Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. And subscribe to our vlog on Youtube.)

    
As our associate director Meggie said in response to the article, “If you start building an audience after production is wrapped, you’re too late.” We share Jon Reiss’ opinion that every film needs a PMD from start to finish, but from Kindling’s perspective, we would add that the idea is often not only to market and distribute a film, but to market and distribute a film and a grassroots movement around the issues at the core of that film.