A Small Act Ambassador screening

Your Comments:

1. Roland Howard 57 says:

   Screening A Small Act was a pleasure and a privilege. As a school, we decided to screen it twice: one in excerpts with activities for year 7 students and the second one in the evening in which staff, parents and people within the community were invited to see the film in its entirety. So overall people exposed to the film was quite high (over 200).

   The daytime screening went very well with many students and staff commenting on how moved they were and what an eye-opener it was. It certainly broke a few African stereotypes and enabled UK students to make comparisons with students in Kenya.

   
   The evening screening also went well. We had the Director of Educaid charity speak about the difference that child sponsorship (although not personalised) made to Sierra Leonian students. She made interesting comments about the film, comparing it to her programme in SL. She believes that child sponsorship when donors are linked with individuals is fraught with problems - do sponsors stop donations when students have to leave school, is the individual link mainly for the benefit of donors not recipients? The audience asked her questions and she gave a pitch for Educaid.

   Then year 10 students presented viral ads that they had made for Educaid. Canapes and bubbly were also served to maintain the Premiere tradition!

   The thing that I would do differently in future, concerns the timing of the Premiere. All my promotion was before the 2 week, Easter break and the event was the second day back into the Academy. This meant that several staff who had asked for tickets, had forgotten about it and were unable to attend. Having 3 or 4 days in which to blitz the message would have helped. We contacted newspapers and radio but only a handful of members of the public came. No one from church groups who we’d contacted attended. With the right run-in, we could have followed each letter up with a phone call, which might have helped. So, the learning point was to do with timing which affected numbers in the evening. We had 46 and we might have been able to move that up by 10 or more.

   It was a good experience and I will definitely think about future events. I felt supported by Anna throughout and feel that Dogwoof is an organisation that can nurture Ambassadors into their full potential.

   — Comment left on May 2nd, 2011