Financing Suggestions

The most challenging aspect of organizing a Spanish Film Club Festival is finding the budget to do so. While Pragda’s matching grant can help enormously, it does not cover all of the expenses.

Below is a list of ideas that can help you and your school gather the remaining funds. Many of these ideas come from universities that have been organizing Spanish Film Club festivals successfully for a few years.

1) Look for internal grants. A lot of universities have grants for cultural events available to their many departments. Look into what is being offered by your school, and see if it would be compatible with Spanish Film Club.

2) Partner with other university departments. This partnership will not only help you with promoting the festival, but it may also help finance it. All departments have a small budget for events, and if each one of the partnering departments assigns some of that budget to Spanish Film Club, you’ll be able to cover the expenses.

3) Don’t forget to look into non-academic departments! Student associations, the university library, film clubs—they all can be part of it!

4) Organize a fundraising event. This may be a lot of work, but you can enlist students to help!

5) Sell concessions. It is well known that the real business for movie theaters is in the concessions, so follow their example, and sell snacks and beverages.

6) Request the support of local international entities related to each film’s country of origin.

If you have any ideas, suggestions, or recommendations that worked for your festival and you want to share them with us and future festival organizers, please send us an email at filmclub@pragda.com.