Audience Development Forum 2025

Passes On Sale Now!

This two-day forum will focus on increasing audience engagement and community outreach through building a stronger relationship between programming and marketing teams. Whether you have year-round, robust staff resources, or you’re a single programmer/marketer/ticketseller, this forum will allow you to share strategies to drive attendance growth, network with your peers, and confront the evolving landscape of film distribution and its impact on your program.

UPDATE AS OF MAY 7: NEW YORK CITY IS SOLD OUT. Limited space available for Los Angeles and Atlanta, so be sure to register today!

Registration Fees

Register Here as an Individual                Register Here as a Team

Audience Development Forum  

This forum focuses on practical strategies and peer collaboration to:

• Explore innovative approaches to audience engagement and community outreach

• Share insights into funding, fundraising, and resource allocation to support your marketing and programming efforts

• Strengthen the communication and effectiveness of your programming & marketing teams

• Gain insights on diverse programming strategies and case studies on effective audience development from festivals and cinemas

By bringing together programmers, marketers, and film distributors, you will have the opportunity to connect with your colleagues in a dynamic, discussion-focused forum, tackling long-standing challenges while being responsive to current issues. 

Program Highlights

The program will engage participants through workshops, breakout groups, and small group activities. We will also share learnings across the three cities, so you’ll have the opportunity to gain insights from attendees all across the country. The program will break down into four segments:

Identifying Your Audience
Before you can get your audience in the door, you must understand who they are. This segment will tackle the tricky question of ‘who is your audience?’ With so many ways to answer, these workshops and breakouts will focus on using the data you already have to build audience profiles & personas to help you determine who is already attending, and therefore, where you have opportunity to grow, particularly with audiences you may have overlooked.

Programming for Your Audience
What comes first? The program or the audience? Plus, how does the marketing timeline fit in, especially when a film is confirmed last minute? This segment will bring together programming and marketing teams to dig into the questions, strategies, and impact of specific programs for audiences, with a deep focus on strengthening communication & collaboration across the programming & marketing departments.

Engaging Your Audience
Whether you are a festival or a cinema, outreach can’t happen overnight. This segment will deliver workshops, breakouts, and activities designed to improve your engagement strategies based on audience type, shifting your approach from passive to active, and helping you identify the resources you need to see a meaningful increase in not just attendance, but in your community impact.

Retaining Your Audience
How do you keep your audience coming back year after year? How do you convert an audience member who came for a special event screening into a regular moviegoer? This segment will focus on dialing in your strategies for retaining the audiences you’ve identified and built through year-round digital and in-person engagement with your community beyond your festival or cinema.

Schedule at a Glance
Timing may vary from city to city

THURSDAY, JUNE 26TH

8:30am - 9:30am | Arrival & Coffee
9:30am - 12:30pm | Identifying Your Audience segment
12:30pm - 1:30pm | Lunch with Breakout groups
1:30pm - 4:30pm | Programming For Your Audience segment

 After the first day’s sessions conclude, each city will come together in the evening for a fun event, hosted by our sponsors and partners!

FRIDAY, JUNE 27TH

9:00am - 10:00am | Coffee & Networking
10:00am - 1:00pm | Engaging Your Audience segment
1:00pm - 2:00pm | Lunch with Breakout groups
2:00pm - 4:00pm | Retaining Your Audience segment
4:00pm - 4:30pm | Wrap-Up & Key Takeaways

For those sticking around a second night, we will organize an informal social gathering.

FAQs

Why Three Cities? How Will That Work?
By hosting in three cities simultaneously, we can bring the forum to you! We know the value of building regional community and we recognize the high costs of travel. To better serve our community, we want to provide a more accessible, affordable program that also strengthens your regional connectivity. While the program will be similar in each city, with the same topics and discussion-based approach, it will be the unique mix of participants and speakers who bring the dynamic energy and specificity to each Forum.

Which Forum Should I Attend?
There’s no wrong answer! Each program will offer you the opportunity to engage with your peers, dig in to the challenges and opportunities we face in audience development, and *fingers crossed* leave feeling inspired to head back to your community and keep creating your incredible programs every day.

Accessibility
Film Festival Alliance is committed to accessibility as a core value of our ongoing work. In practice, this looks like transparency, clear and timely communication of important information, and a dedicated resource for accommodation requests. Specific venue details for the Audience Development Forum will be announced soon. All venues used will be physically accessible for those in wheelchairs and/or with mobility needs.

For any accessibility questions or requests, please contact accessibility@filmfestivalalliance.org.