The DDF provides up to $15,000 in research and development funding to independent producers of color to develop single documentary programs for public television. Projects should speak to the ITVS mission to serve underserved audiences with programs that take creative risks, explore complex issues, inspire dialogue and express points of view seldom seen on commercial or public television.

Funded activities may include travel, research, script development, preliminary production for
fundraising/work-in-progress reels, or other early phase activities.

DDF accepts:

• Projects that have not yet begun production
• Programs that can become eligible for ITVS production funding initiatives as single programs of standard broadcast length (half-hour or one-hour). In rare cases ITVS will consider feature-length programs.

DDF does not accept:

• Proposals for completed projects seeking distribution
• Series proposals or fictional dramas
• Projects intended solely for theatrical release

Find more information about guidelines and how to apply on our website.

Calling all independent media makers (yes, we’re talking to you filmmakers!). Do you want to explore new ways of telling your story? Do you have an idea that takes advantage of both traditional and digital media? Then take a look at Localore, a new initiative from our friends at The Association of Independents in Radio (AIR), that’s designed to fuel public media’s capacity for innovative storytelling and journalism.

Through Localore, AIR will recruit talented radio, TV, film, and online producers to lead 10 public station-based projects, blending approaches to broadcast and digital platforms. This means mixing traditional media with mobile applications, online video, digital games, data visualization and maps — anything that will help to bring stories to the public in new ways beyond broadcast.

Interested producers are invited to submit proposals until November 10th at Localore.net.A second round of vetting in December will call on producers, matched with incubator stations, to submit final proposals.

Watch the station runway video (above) to see which public stations are interested in partnering with Independents. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to get your innovative project considered for this game-changing initiative.

Welcome to the first in a series of updates on the production side of the public media world at large — in particular at ITVS, where our production team is working with filmmakers on more than 150 programs scheduled for public television. Topics will range from technology advances to marketing strategies and trends, and to ITVS policies.

Our goal has always been to listen and serve producers in a spirit of collaboration, and so I hope you will share your ideas for continuing the partnership. Throughout the past few years, ITVS has been hearing from more and more of you about the enormous fiscal challenges of producing longitudinal projects. We have been studying the marketplace, reaching out to past and current ITVS-funded producers, conducting interviews, and looking for ways to help. Effective October 1, ITVS will allow recoupment of verifiable, approved, producer paid out-of-pocket expenses from first ancillary incomes. The change applies to open programs and newly funded programs in the future.

Orientation

This summer we brought 22 producers of 11 programs to San Francisco for a four-day intensive orientation workshop about working in public media and with ITVS.  The producer orientations are scheduled several times during the year as decisions are made about production funding/licensing.  Here are some highlights from our orientations in 2011:

Please look out for future blog posts on crowdfunding and its implications for producers working in Public Media, a webinar on rights clearances with archivist and filmmaker Kenn Rabin, and a closer look into our P360 Basic and Enhanced initiatives for funded filmmakers.

The ‘web documentary’ genre has matured and evolved greatly in recent years, thanks in large part to technological advances that empower creators with more robust production and storytelling tools (see examples here and here). This got the folks at ITVS and Mozilla’s Popcorn Project talking about how they could work together to explore the space between traditional documentary and the social web. 

Mozilla’s Popcorn project is an innovation lab that brings together filmmakers and developers to re-imagine and create interactive cinema online. The  innovation team develops demos and productions that spin off into software projects like Popcorn.js, a JavaScript library for HTML5 video. Mozilla’s commitment to building open web tools is an ideal compliment to ITVS’s ability to convene talented filmmakers and give them the opportunity to use the latest technology.

The two organizations will be hosting a two-day invitational ”hackathon” on October 12th and 13th in San Francisco with a select group of independent filmmakers. Mozilla will marshall developers from the broader open web community to work with the filmmakers on new ideas that advance their storytelling. UX (user experience) and visual designers will rapidly prototype a handful of web documentary projects that ITVS will then consider for production funding. Projects that receive production funding will be announced by early November. ITVS and Mozilla hope that this will become a successful strategy to develop new forms of documentary storytelling and engage more filmmakers to tell tell their stories in new ways.

Mozilla will be showcasing some of these new storytelling techniques and highlighting its work to promote innovation in online video at this weekend’s Open Video Conference at New York Law School. Learn more at http://openvideoconference.org.

By Sreedevi Sripathy

This month, ITVS will be re-launching our popular IndiesLab monthly blog post with Sreedevi Sripathy, Director of Broadcast and Distribution, discussing research, news, and trends that come out of ITVS’s IndiesLab.

If your film is screening in Chicago, how much sense does it make to just post that fact on your film’s Facebook fan page, where most of your fans are probably not from Chicago? Not much, for a couple of reasons.

First, as we know from a previous Being Social column, only about 25 percent of your fans will see any given post. That means only 25 percent of your fans in Chicago are likely to see your announcement. That’s not effective, and it looks pretty ham-fisted to your fans who live nowhere near Chicago.

Targeting links and status updates

What you may not know is that you can geo-target your posts to specific geographical regions, which is handy for events such as screenings. Here’s how to do it:

1) Put your link to the event listing in the link field, and add a message about the event as you normally would.

2) Before you click on “Share,” notice the drop-down menu beside it that says “Everyone.” Bet you never noticed that before, right?

3) Select “Customize” from the menu.

4) You will be prompted to specify a country, and then specify a region or a city. (When you click the “city” radio button you may see instructions to “Enter a workplace or school.” Ignore this, it’s a bug on Facebook’s end, probably a future feature or abandoned feature)

5) If you are likely to draw audience from outside the specific city, include suburbs and neighboring cities.

6) It’s not required, but you could specify and language as well.

7) Select “Okay.” Now you’re ready to share!

Targeting Updates

You can also send geo-targeted messages, or “updates” to your fans. This is different than a post in a couple of ways. It won’t appear on your Facebook page, but rather will arrive in your fans’ Facebook in-box. And that’s EVERY fan in the geographical area you select (who has indicated their location on their profile).

You can also drill down even more finely, by targeting an age range or a gender.

While updates are an efficient way of contacting all of your fans in a given area at once, use them sparingly. A lot of updates can be irritating and spammy to some users.

OK here’s how you do it.

1) In the upper right of your page, click the “Edit Page” button

2)On the list of options in the left margin, select “Resources”

3) Under “Connect with people,” select “Send an update”

4) Now, click the box next to “Target this update”

5) Simply begin typing to choose the cities or region you want to target, as we did in the previous example. (Limiting the age range can be helpful for events where alcohol will be served, for example.)

6) Write a title likely to entice people to click to open it, and include a brief explanation of the content you are bringing to their attention and why. Don’t include links or HTML in these areas.

7) Below the body text field, you’ll see two links — “Record Video” and “Include link.” If applicable, include a link for more information, and consider doing a short webcam intro yourself. Personal video like this is extremely effective.

Now you’re ready to send your message.

Next time, we’ll look at some free and inexpensive tools to help you measure how effective your social media efforts are.

Read Brooke’s previous entry on how to setup and leverage your twitter account.

Follow Independent Lens on Twitter.

See Brooke’s tips in action and LIKE the Independent Lens Facebook page.

A common misconception about Facebook is that however many friends or fans you have, they will all see each of your posts. This is simply not the case. In fact, only about one of every four of your posts will be seen by a given fan. And it isn’t because Facebook has some dark ploy to censor you, despite the viral rumors to that effect that surface every few months.

Say you have 200 friends and are a fan of 40 pages. Even if each only updated or posted once a day, would you really be able to handle that many real-time updates? Your newsfeed would be moving to quickly to keep up with. To address that problem, Facebook came up with a somewhat mysterious algorithm called EdgeRank (similar to Google’s PageRank) that weighs the quality and variety of your posts and your past record of posting relevant content to deliver your post to a manageable number of your fans.

Maximizing your EdgeRank is an important part of a strategy to stay visible among your fans. A good post will attract interaction in the form of likes, comments, and shares (shares are weighted highest, followed by comments, and then likes). The more of those you get, the better the odds that that post and future posts will make it into a greater number of your fans’ newsfeeds. To that end, here are some quick tricks for boosting your EdgeRank:

• Ask Questions. Facebook is a two-way conversation. Ask your fans what their thoughts are. Be specific, and avoid open-ended questions like “What do you think?” Instead, ask something like, “If they made a documentary about your life, it would be called _____.” Questions appeal to people’s desire to be involved and heard, and it builds both goodwill and a sense of personal investment in your page and brand. Better yet, once a fan interacts with your page, they are more likely to see a greater percentage of your future posts.

• Mix it Up. Don’t just post links, and don’t just post status updates. Try posting photo albums, videos, polls, and questions. Photos in particular have high interaction potential. They don’t need to be high art. Behind-the-scenes on the set, candids of people who work at your station, funny signs or situations … all of these encourage interaction and also make you appear accessible and human.

• Interact. Like and comment on your fans’ posts. Be a part of the community and an audience for their content, too. This establishes what EdgeRank refers to as “affinity.” If you interact with a fan, Facebook presumes you have an active relationship with that person and that they are interested in your content and you in theirs.

• Keep it Fresh. Mostly, the key is to be consistent. If you neglect your page, then when you do get around to posting, very few of your fans will see your content in their newsfeed (remember, almost no one goes to your Facebook page directly after they’ve become your fan. 95 percent of Facebook activity is on a given user’s own newsfeed). Post reasonably often, because a post’s rank will degrade over time.

• Watch your stats and adjust accordingly. To see what is working and what isn’t, just experiment, and regularly check Facebook Insights (or a similar tool) to see how various posts fared. The higher the number of interactions, the better, but the really valuable number is “impressions” under the interactions heading. On the average page, that number is likely to be about 30 percent of your total number of fans. Consider yourself a rock star if you boost it and maintain an average over 50 percent.

Read Brooke’s previous entry on how to create and maintain an effective Facebook page.

See Brooke’s tips in action and LIKE the Independent Lens Facebook page.

We will be offering weekly tips for independent filmmakers and public media entities on getting the most out of social media. Visit BTB Thursdays for some good advice for your Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking strategies.

No matter if you are a filmmaker, a station, or a public media brand, the very first place to start is by creating (or switching to) a Facebook page. Note, I say page, and not group or profile. This is an absolutely crucial distinction.

A Facebook profile is designed to be the outward-facing real estate for an individual human being. In fact, brands that use profiles rather than pages are in violation of Facebook’s terms. While Facebook has not yet shut down brands using profiles, they have made clear that it is within their rights to do so, and it’s not worth the risk.

Facebook groups are designed to be a conversation space for people with a shared interest. While that sounds attractive for a film on a given topic, groups have earned a bad reputation because they tend to be spam magnets and overwhelm subscribers with messages. Also, groups cannot be tagged by pages or individuals, which greatly diminishes their chance to go viral or even show up in users’ newsfeeds.

Pages are designed for businesses and brands, and they are built to support their needs. Facebook greatly improved the functionality of pages in the past year, allowing much more opportunity to customize, geo-target, and message to fans.

When setting up your Facebook page, name it in a way that encourages tagging. That means keep it short and direct. For example, choose “The Godfather” as opposed to “The Godfather – The Film by Francis Ford Coppola”. Once you have created your page, get 25 of your friends to become friends as quickly as possible, so you can secure a URL that is short and intuitive (i.e. facebook.com/godfather).

Finally, be thoughtful about the image you use to represent your brand/film/station. Don’t try to jam too much information into it, but rather make it visual and straightforward with minimal text. If you have a logo, that’s a good place to start. Also be conscious of how Facebook crops this image for the icons beside your posts – make sure your identity survives in this small space.

Next week — fancy doo-dads you can add to your page to make it “sticky.”

Known as the “pre-eminent documentary festival in the U.S.,” Silverdocs is a seven-day international film festival and five-day concurrent conference that promotes documentary film as a leading art form and supports the work of independent filmmakers.

Silverdocs kicks today in Silver Spring, Maryland and both ITVS staff and films are well represented:

For independent filmmakers, ITVS Senior Programming Manager Richard Saiz will be on hand for two conference sessions: “Pitch to ITVS” on Thursday, June 23 at 1 PM and “ITVS and the Art of the Short Story” on Friday, June 24 at 11:15 AM.  For more info on these and the many other informative Silverdocs conference events, click here.

For documentary film fans, be among the first to get a sneak peek at a plethora of ITVS films that will be coming to PBS including Being Elmo, Better This World, The Black Power Mixtape, Donor Unknown, Give Up Tomorrow, Hell and Back Again, If a Tree Falls, The Interrupters, The Learning, Still Here, The Team, To Be Heard, and When the Drum is Beating. For more information on Silverdocs films and to purchase tickets, click here >>

Have a great time at the festival!

Starting four years ago as a partnership between Gucci and the Tribeca Film Institute, the fund aims to humanize socially important issues from around the world that aren’t receiving attention from the mainstream media. Over the past four years, the fund has supported 30 films.

This year, nine projects have been chosen as grantees, with three earmarked for money from the fund’s inaugural Spotlighting Women Documentary Award which highlights the courage, strength of character, and compassion of women from around the world. For a complete list of the grantees, visit www.tribecafilminstitute.org.

Congratulations to the filmmakers!