Introduction

Celebrating over three decades of cinematic excellence, the DC Environmental Film Festival stands as the premier global platform for nature documentaries and environmental films.

Ian Taylor, my friend and co-worker while I was the Director of Marketing at Apollo Creative, had already handled many of DCEFF’s design needs for the prior 6 years - but in 2021, after two consecutive years of COVID-induced losses and a festival that struggled to adapt to an all-virtual format, we saw an opportunity to partner up and go further together and help the Festival modernize for our new digital world.

With the weight of 30 years of history and 2 disappointing all-virtual festivals in a row behind our overhaul of the all-virtual Festival, we knew that we’d have to leverage paid ads, content, email and SEO in addition to completely reinvigorating the Festival’s brand to get things back on track - so that’s exactly what we did.

Below - some key results we achieved in our first 5 months with DCEFF.

The Process

Whenever I start working with a new organization, I begin with a deep-dive discovery process which includes each of the following for both the organization and relevant competitors:

• A brand, content & organic social media audit

• A paid ads audit

• An audience and demographics audit

• Language-market-fit analysis & roadmap

• Full SEO audit including a keyword roadmap

• Web traffic analysis

• Audience persona generation/refinement

From these audits, Ian & I determined a prioritization of brand, growth, & content services that would scale the film festival fast:

Video Content

For the DC Environmental Film Festival's landmark 30th celebration, I had the pleasure of crafting the official DCEFF30 festival trailer (amongst many other video projects leveraging the festival's incredible access to nature footage)—a project that blossomed into one of my favorite ever creations. Click below to view some of my video work for DCEFF30:

These trailers didn't just rack up hundreds of thousands of views across social media and the like; they resonated deeply, sparking real joy, anticipation, and tangibly garnering new attendees for the festival. The DCEFF team honored my DCEFF30 main trailer by making it the opening act for every film screening, weaving it into the fabric of the festival's legacy.

This endeavor was a testament to the magic that happens when visuals and passion collide, creating something truly unforgettable for the festival and its community.

Web

DCEFF’s existing website just didn’t cut it in terms of design, function or performance - so we redesigned, rewrote and redeveloped our own custom version from scratch while maintaining and building upon what already worked.

But a fantastic piece of infrastructure isn’t worth much if no one uses it… so I paid keen attention to SEO best practices and the lessons provided by my technical & content SEO audits and keyword roadmap to rewrite & optimize the DCEFF site in a way that would not only maintain, but improve their rankings for all of their most crucial business terms - terms that I identified previously with my LMF experimentation via Google Ads.

In addition to conversion tracking, I instrumented session replay to improve our conversion rates & analyzed years’-worth of data from Google Analytics to learn more about the festival users’ tendencies, preferences and pain points. This data informed not only the new site’s design, but its function, structure, CTA placement, e-commerce setup and more.

Social

When Ian & I inherited DCEFF’s Instagram account, it was struggling with two separate but inter-linked problems: A lack of followers, and a lack of engagement from existing followers. Our efforts here had a major impact within just a few months:

How did we do it? By auditing DCEFF’s competitors and the broader industry to see what was working and what wasn’t, I was able to craft an incredibly effective organic social media strategy that created rapid growth from day one.

But, like I said earlier, it wasn’t good enough to just increase followers. You know those accounts with tens of thousands of followers but like, 5 likes per post? We didn’t want to be that account… so we leveraged strategic social media partners for the Festival including The Jane Goodall Institute (1.1 million followers on Instagram), Amazon Watch (149K followers on Instagram) and more to amplify our messaging and lend us more credibility. Simultaneously, we developed and posted content that went beyond the typical product-pushing posts of your average e-commerce brand to engage our audience with something different and interesting.

Paid Ads

Like many clients, DCEFF had run Facebook Ads before we came on board to manage them. But, they had struggled to find value in the platform due to preventative barriers like establishing effective conversion tracking, reliably refining their targeting, creating and writing captivating ad content, establishing a funnel, taking actionable insights from data and navigating privacy concerns stemming from recent iOS updates. 

That’s where I came in - mining audience insights and creating data-driven personas to identify high-converting audiences of millions of users and reaching them with static and video content that made them say things like this: 

All of the above comments are real and were posted on the ads that I created & placed on Facebook Ads for DCEFF30 by real Facebook & Instagram users.

But I didn’t stop at Facebook Ads. The Festival knew that the future of their audience was on multiple social media platforms, with TikTok and YouTube both logical fits for an organization with a plethora of fantastic video assets. So, we allocated part of our ad budget to these platforms and saw incredible returns from our efforts.

Paid Search

The Google Ad Grant for Non-Profits is an incredibly valuable piece of the digital marketing puzzle for any non-profit. That’s why we made a point of getting the Festival back in compliance to begin receiving the grant again this year for DCEFF30. 

The Festival had utilized the grant in the past, but had struggled to activate much of its monthly spend due to the challenges of maintaining a 5% click through rate. By the time we came on board, the Festival’s grant had been inactive for several years and required a lengthy recertification process. One of our first steps was to get the Festival’s grant re-certified, completely overhaul their keyword strategy and formulate all new ads for them that would produce high click rates which would help us scale grant spend over time.

Email

Email remains one of the most consistently profitable channels for any B2C brand, and forms one of the core tenants of our film festival marketing approach. The first thing we did was overhaul the look and writing style of emails. Simultaneously, we experimented with send times, did subject line and preview text A/B tests and more to land on the ideal timing, content and creative format for our regular newsletter sends. 

During the ramp up to the festival, we massively increased the number of emails sent while deepening our segmentation strategy to prevent subscriber fatigue. These increases in the quality and quantity of emails led to an explosion in positive email metrics like the number of email opens and clicks. We also brought other strategies to the table, like re-sending emails to non-openers, customizing subject lines for subscribers, and segmenting subscribers by their engagement level - all of which contributed greatly to further improving open and click rates and making email one of DCEFF’s most profitable advertising channels. 

Working with the Festival was an incredibly positive and rewarding experience for me and I'm incredibly grateful to have gotten the opportunity to better position them for the future. Long live DCEFF!

There's a lot more that Ian and I accomplished in our year with DCEFF. If you're interested in learning more, please don't hesitate to reach out to me via email at max@astronautcreative.com - or simply fill out the form at the bottom of this page!