User blog:Brian Linder/Community Partnerships April Update: Intro to Entertainment Partnerships
We’ve talked a lot about our Community Partnerships team on the Staff Blog lately – from our March update about gaming wiki partnerships, to welcoming new team members, to our full overview of the Community team structure. So we thought we’d keep that conversation going with some more exciting news to share about how we’re expanding the scope of wiki partner initiatives over the coming months.
In our gaming wiki partnerships update last month, we highlighted the excellent work the Community Gaming team has been doing to connect wiki communities with the publishers and developers who make the games their wikis are covering. These efforts are a continuation of the partnership focus first developed by Gamepedia, which the Gamepedia team brought over when Fandom and Curse Media joined forces back in 2019.
Our partnership focus was primarily in the gaming space the last few years because we saw a lot of alignment with gaming partners who, increasingly so, really understand who makes wikis unique and special. That enabled our teams to establish trusted relationships with publishers and developers big and small to unlock access, assets, and other special opportunities for editors on numerous gaming wikis.
With that success under our belt, and with that same alignment growing within the entertainment space, we’re feeling good about expanding into our next partnership venture: entertainment partners!
Expanding on our intro to the Community team, which established that we now have a Community Entertainment team (in addition to the new Community Gaming team), I’m excited to give you a first look at our efforts to bring similar opportunities to Fandom communities in the TV, streaming, and movies space.
Now, I’ll turn this over to my colleagues Mandy and Mike for more details...
Entertainment Partnerships Overview
MANDY OLSON
TITLE: Manager, Community Partnerships
Entertainment
MANDY: Hey y’all! I’m super excited to take on my new role as Manager of Community Partnerships, Entertainment at Fandom! I’m so proud to be leading a talented team of entertainment experts to do even bigger and better things for wikis covering topics in TV, streaming, and movies. That includes two of our new Community Managers, Chris and Miller, who will be directly supporting entertainment wikis; as well as Mike, who just took on the new role of Community Partnerships Manager, Entertainment to drive our new entertainment partnership program.
One of the most exciting things I was part of last year is actually a great example of the approach we’ll be taking to partnerships. We worked with World of Wonder, the production company behind RuPaul’s Drag Race, and together we partnered with RuPaul's Drag Race Wiki to launch a bracket tournament, Snatchdown for the Crown, where fans got to choose who they thought had the best Snatch Game performance of all time – complete with social media co-promotion from World of Wonder and the Drag Race Wiki.
As part of that partnership, we also attended RuPaul’s DragCon in LA, where we filmed several videos with some of the iconic queens of Drag Race to hear about their drag journeys and their hopes for the future – including one where the queens talked about their own pages on the Drag Race Wiki! You can watch that video here:
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Earlier this year, we were also able to work with WoW to get all access passes to DragCon UK for members of the Drag Race Wiki community, including Fandom Star and Drag Race Wiki admin Itsbartbytheway; as well as Lady Lostris, the community’s Wiki Representative. WoW also provided a discount code for Fandom users buying tickets to the event.
Obviously, not every partnership will involve attending a convention, but the Drag Race partnership is a big reason why we’re optimistic about this program, as it represents a lot of what we’re aiming for with entertainment partnerships – on-wiki activations, social media promotion, assets and access, and more benefits that provide exciting and unique opportunities for the community.
To hear more about what we’re working on this year and how we’re thinking about entertainment partnerships moving forward, I’ll pass it over to Mike!
Defining Our Approach to Entertainment Partnerships
MIKE DELANEY
Community Partnerships Manager
Entertainment
MIKE: Hello everyone! I’m very excited to have the chance to share a brief overview of the approach we’re going to be using to build and leverage our new entertainment community partnerships over the coming weeks and months.
Firstly, we’ll be connecting with entertainment industry entities such as TV streaming services, film studios, production companies, and other content providers that align with many of the platform’s top wikis and (hopefully) your favourite shows and films.
But that’s not all! In addition to the content providers themselves, we see licensees as a new area of opportunity for entertainment wiki partnerships. And so we’ll be focusing on the companies that make tie-in products like toys, collectibles, and other merchandise. Entertainment is about more than just what is on the screen — it’s also about the worlds and franchises they inhabit.
With our new expanded community management team, our strategy will give us a deeper understanding of the needs and wants of our top wikis. In turn, we will use that awareness and our own expertise as entertainment specialists and, most importantly, as fans ourselves to create a meaningful and mutually beneficial framework that benefits the partner and the community.
More to Come
Thanks, Mike and Mandy! Now, you may be wondering, how can I sign up for a partnership? We do want to make sure we set expectations appropriately: feel free to let us know that you’re interested in having your wiki be part of an entertainment (or gaming!) partnership, but we can’t guarantee it’ll definitely happen. Partnerships are dependent on who we have relationships with, who we can build a relationship with, and whether or not a prospective partner is interested in having a wiki partnership at all. What we’ll commit to is doing our best to build as many meaningful partnerships as we can.
We’re also looking forward to sharing more about this expanded initiative with those of you who will be attending Community Connect either in-person or virtually (more info to come on virtual attendance!) later this month. In fact, there may even be a few partner-provided surprises in store!
We’ll be back again next month with the latest updates about how we’re working with communities and partners, as well as an update about how we work on sales partnerships (which we originally had planned for this blog, but we decided to spotlight our focus on entertainment partnerships for this month). So stay tuned for that, feel free to reach out to me or Mike and the team with any questions – or post them in the comments!
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