Well like I said, I live in a small town with lots of bored college students. It's easy to get support from:
* Local historical society, has a ton of info and is only too happy to share ("Youngin's these days don't care!") etc. etc. Excited that young people will be researching the town's history.
* Local newspaper, willing to let us have the entire newspaper archives in exchange for digitizing it for them. At the end of it we will have an entire searchable DB of hundreds of years worth of plot and character info.
* Local newspaper, willing to give us free press because it's more exciting than printing about Sherrif Farmer's dog or whatever else they fill up space with
* Local college students and student associations (engineering/nerd school), bored to tears with Nerf Wars or whatever else it is they do on weekends and are willing to do insane amounts of work for even a modest reward
* Local college is based around a historical person and is only too happy to learn he is a major character in the plot, instant writeups from student journalists and support/goodwill from college staff, invaluable help from professors
* Lots of bored CS students with nothing better to do. There's plenty of bored website designers and so on, and enough really competent people that we can roll out a small voip network or build a few robots into the landscape (trapdoors in abandoned buildings and whatnot)
This is, I think, the recipe for our success in a small college town. I would not take this route at all if you're trying to hit some urban area (from your initial post it looks like you're doing it as marketing, so quite frankly I wouldn't recommend doing any of this if your intent is to reach large groups of people). I should also note that this is just a side project (and a long-term one at that), I expect to take a few years planning before I actually do it (I have a startup that requires all my attention in the meantime).