In 1986, MIX CPH screened six films. This year, that number has increased to 102 films. How would you like to manage that festival?
The MIX CPH team handles everything related to film curation, event planning, and marketing. Their biggest challenge boils down to limited resources. That’s because, for 33 years, MIX CPH has been 100% volunteer-driven and non-profit, so the big question is: how do you keep delivering quality with a limited budget, time and volunteers?
You start enalyzing.
Keeping volunteers happy
As an entirely volunteer-driven festival, MIX CPH puts special focus on the well-being, engagement, and satisfaction of the entire team. They want to ensure that planning Denmark’s third largest film festival is something enjoyable and fulfilling. How do they do it? Surveys, of course! But it wasn’t always that smooth.
“Last year, we sent out a set of questions via email to all the volunteers and they sent their replies to me, which of course I kept confidentially. Why did we do it like this? I don’t know. But needless to say that it’s easier with Enalyzer”
– Sara Sørensen, Head of Volunteers at MIX CPH.
MIX CPH now sends out an anonymous Enalyzer survey to all their volunteers twice a year. They can now compare results from previous periods, for example, their mid-year evaluation results with the end of the year evaluation results.
“With Enalyzer reports, we can see if our decisions are having a positive or negative impact on people’s stress level, workload, engagement, etc. It gives us a clear overview of whether or not we’re meeting our goals and allows us to make smarter decisions for current and future volunteers”
– Sara
Apart from the all-year-round volunteers, MIX CPH recruits volunteers that help with practical stuff during the festival, such as bartending for parties, program distribution, and more. Their evaluations are now being handled via Enalyzer as well.
“We have a high turnover of volunteers which can lead to enormous knowledge drain. Having all this data available in reports can easily paint a picture of things that have worked and not worked in the past, making decision making more informed and easier.”
– Sara
What’s a festival without awards?
MIX CPH decided to run their very popular Audience Award and some competitions on their social media, using Enalyzer!
“We had to drop the Audience Award last year because we didn’t have enough volunteers to handle the voting. With Enalyzer, we created a gorgeous survey and added it to our website and we can gladly say that the Audience Award is back!”
– Gintaras Vagelas, Head of Program
In a couple of minutes, they set up a simple, yet effective, survey and embedded it on their website where their audience could vote for their favorite films. The winners this year was George Michael Freedom: The Director’s Cut.
Removing human error and saving time
MIX CPH works hard to bring the best contemporary LGBTQ+ films to Denmark; this means they have to do extensive research of other film festivals. They also receive multiple daily submissions all year round. So how did they use to handle this?
“We need to know everything about a film: title, available formats, production year, director, production country, and more. Before we started using Enalyzer, those submitting films sent us an email with all the information we needed. The responsible for submissions had to manually type this information in our database – it took forever.”
– Gintaras
So what did the program group do? They found Enalyzer and Zapier.
They set up a submission form using Enalyzer, where directors, producers, distributors, or whoever is submitting their film can fill in the necessary information. They placed the form on their website and social media. Instead of getting emails, all the information they needed was now stored in their Enalyzer accounts. The next step was to set up some Zaps.
Having to enter the data into their database and answering submission emails took too much time, and as volunteers, this is a limited resource. That’s why they set up two Zaps, so when someone submits a film, Zapier automatically creates it in the MIX CPH Airtable database and sends a confirmation email to whoever submitted the film.
“Needless to say that we were all very excited about this solution. Instead of waiting for someone to insert the films, which can sometimes take a couple of days, our database is now continuously updated. We have more time to do what we do best, watch films!”
– Gintaras
Quiz competitions!
“It’s a fun way to give out some nice presents, do some PR for our films and engage our audience.”
– Iris Wenander, Head of PR/Web.
The PR team decided to use the Enalyzer Score Calculator feature to create some fun quiz competitions for their participants! The quiz had fun questions about MIX CPH 2018 film program, which helped create awareness of their films as well as reward their audience with some goodie bags!
