About the festival
The Greenville Jewish Film Festival (GJFF) is a 501©(3) nonprofit in Greenville, South Carolina, connecting the community through film. Its screenings are meant to educate, inspire and entertain, and to show both what is distinct about Jewish heritage and what it shares with everyone else. The festival is run largely by volunteers, so the tools behind it have to stay simple.
The brief
GJFF now runs pop-up screenings through the year, and by 2026 the website and email list needed to keep up:
- Past screenings had gaps. Some films from recent years no longer showed up anywhere on the site.
- Ticketing and donations ran on WooCommerce and GiveWP, which was more system than a volunteer team needed.
- Each pop-up needed its own landing page, ticket sales and a run of emails to fill the room.
A film archive that keeps itself current
The gaps had one cause. GJFF’s films were stored three different ways across three eras: as regular posts, then as WooCommerce products during the ticketing years, then as posts again. Once WooCommerce was removed, nine films from 2024 and 2025 were left in a format nothing could display, so their pages returned errors and they fell out of every list.
We moved those films back into the same format as the rest, split the SpringFest 2023 program into its three films, and gave every screening a real date, from 2018 to 2026. A small custom plugin adds a film series category, sorts screenings by date and redirects the old ticket links to the right film.
The new All Films page went live on August 31, 2026. It shows upcoming screenings at the top and past ones below. When a screening date passes, the film moves to the past list on its own, so nobody has to edit the menu after each event.
An SEO pass
Alongside the archive we cleaned up how the site shows up in search:
- Every page was printing its meta description twice. We fixed that at the theme level.
- The organization’s structured data was empty. It now describes GJFF as a nonprofit, with its logo, description and social profiles.
- We corrected the sitemap, fixed redirects that pointed at an old server address and turned on social sharing cards.
- The All Films page got its own title and description, and film summaries were trimmed to a length search results can show in full.
Email campaigns for the pop-ups
Each pop-up gets a short email run in Constant Contact, planned with the festival’s leaders and written in GJFF’s warm, invitational voice. In 2026 that covered Ada: My Mother the Architect in the spring, a private screening of From Shtetl to Swing in August, Bella at the end of August with five sends and a thank-you, and The Soundman, a complimentary November screening in commemoration of Kristallnacht. Each email has a clear job: announce the film, give a reason to come, then remind people of the date. For The Soundman we also designed the film’s poster and the header art for its emails.
Tickets and donations on Givebutter
We moved GJFF’s ticketing and donations to Givebutter one event at a time, starting with a pilot for Ada in May. Each pop-up now has a Givebutter checkout built into its own page on the festival’s site, and the donation page uses Givebutter too. For an older audience we kept checkout plain and treated the optional tip as a choice, not a fee.
Where it started
Before the pop-ups, we built GJFF’s earlier website with ticket sales, a history of past festivals and a donation path, and designed the posters, social graphics, ads and emails that carried the brand around town. Much of that brand and content carried straight into the current site.
For another Greenville nonprofit, see Greenville Mentoring Collaborative, or read about our systems and integrations work.