Community seeding

Promoting an event by placing it inside communities that have already gathered, rather than broadcasting into open space and hoping the right people wander past. For a filmmaker community that means film schools, camera rental shops, editors’ and actors’ group chats, workshop organisers, partner communities whose members overlap with yours, and sponsor channels willing to amplify. The published tactics also include exclusive previews given to a partner community first, which gives that community a reason to care and a reason to share. Seeding is the broadcast-scale version of the same instinct behind the one-on-one ask: go to where people already trust somebody, instead of asking them to trust you cold.

Source: Named in the event-promotion literature as a pre-event tactic set: partnerships with influencers and partner communities, exclusive content previews, and sponsor channels amplifying the event (EventsAir, event promotion timeline). The person-by-person version, where a community grows through individual conversations rather than reach, is the method Rachel Eilbott describes building a hundred offline chapters with, starting from Manila with no contacts and almost no budget (CMX Summit talk).

First used in: 2.3 · Community-facing marketing.