We had some great questions in the session and I wanted to make sure to cover those.

The model we talked about today was primarily for small, private parties, but you can certainly encourage people to throw larger, public events.

If the parties are within the geographic region of your offices, you can involve staff or volunteers and use them to direct the conversation. This will take some extra planning, and a bit of practice, too. Think of some of the main points you want to really drive home, then work backwards and think of questions that might direct a conversation to those points. Think of some of the questions you get from your constituents now, or questions that come to your website. These would be more in-depth that the FAQs on your site. These need to be thought provoking, discussion starters.

If you are screening a film and want to promote the screening to the public, Brave New Theaters is a great resource that one of our training participants shared. http://bravenewtheaters.com/ provides everything a party planner needs to find a film and host a screening. This is a great resource!

Also, if you are looking for films and documentaries related to a certain issue, a good place to look is http://www.mediarights.org/. Here you can look for films based on issue, and connect with the filmmakers, other nonprofits, or educators.

If you plan to use a conference call as an event, you’ll want to make sure the individual parties have access to good sound quality. Depending on the size of the party, you might be fine with a simple speaker function on the house phone. You might also explore options such as skype or other online conferencing tools. (Sometimes computers have better speakers than phones)

Lastly, we talked about lead time for planning an event. If you are working towards a specific date, you should have the planning materials available no less than 6 weeks in advance. (This is for the smaller, private house party model. If you are encouraging people to host large, public events, you may need to begin planning at least 3 months in advance).