Brew Fest Boss Hustles For Sponsors For Growing Event

MONCTON – It was with no shortage of effort that Amber Richards recruited sponsors to this year’s Atlantic Canadian Craft Brew Fest.

 

Guest post by SAM MACDONALD, HUDDLE

Richards is a Moncton-based event planner and chief experience officer for Amber Effect Events. She’s also the driving force behind the 7^th Cox & Palmer Atlantic Canadian Craft Brew Fest.

Richards tells Huddle it’s been more challenging than usual to bring sponsors on board for the festival’s seventh incarnation.

“It’s been a little more difficult this year, to reach potential sponsors – whereas when I tried to reach sponsors in 2020 the majority of them actually returned my emails and phone calls,” Richards says.

She says everyone bouncing back from the pandemic and planning out their year is likely the culprit behind the slower sponsor recruitment.

“Once restrictions got lifted in the spring and the flood gates opened, everyone got back to planning out their year and doing business as usual, with planning and marketing and things like that. Everyone has been really busy and I’m finding it hard to get a hold of people,” says Richards.

To adapt, Richards has worked with this year’s current sponsors to build custom sponsorship plans that fit their needs, dropping the traditional model of one-size-fits-all, gold-silver-bronze-style plans.

“If they feel we share an audience and there’s a fit we can work with any budget,” Richards says.

“We are customizing our activations 100 percent to meet the goals of sponsors and help them achieve the metrics they’re looking to achieve.”

That kind of work to find the right fit with potential sponsors takes more time, Richards notes, but is worth the trouble.

“Going through discovery with every prospect and the time it takes to reach those prospects are definitely time-consuming,” she says.

“It’s effective and worth it because the audience is interested in the sponsors and they want to hear from them and connect with them – so it’s a win-win for sponsors and the audience.”

The title sponsor for this year’s Oct. 29 event is once again Cox & Palmer. Other sponsors this year include All EV by Steele Auto Group, CrossFit Moncton, 91.9 the Bend, and 97.3 the Wave.

Returning Festival

This year, to accommodate the need for social distancing, the 7^th Cox & Palmer Atlantic Canadian Craft Brew Fest will have an afternoon in addition to its evening session.

“The evening session can get very busy and I figure adding an afternoon session will ease up some congestion,” says Richards.

VIP tickets for the festival, which will support the United Way of Greater Moncton and Southeastern New Brunswick, have completely sold out and a third of the available tickets for the evening session have already sold.

When asked the cost of an event this scale, Richards says that while she couldn’t immediately share any numbers “it’s certainly not cheap.”

In 2019, the last time Richards launched a full-scale Craft Brew Fest before adapting to the pandemic with a smaller, pared-down, Covid-safe remote event featuring a Brewfest In a Box in 2020 and temporarily suspending the festival in 2021, the event sold 760 tickets.

This year, she’s expecting 1,000 tickets to sell.

“I think the general consensus is that everyone is anxious to get back to life as normal again and do events, see friends and connect with others, after the last two years of Zoom meetings,” notes Richards.

Richards told Huddle she expects to see a similar number of brewers, cideries and mead makers to 2019, in the 25,000-square-foot berth reserved for the event in the Moncton Coliseum.