We hope you enjoyed the 2020 festival. Although hundreds of volunteers come together in festival week, it’s a small team working behind the scenes for months before that gets us to the main event. That small team needs to get bigger to secure the festival’s long-term future.
Since 2014, we’ve tried to develop MBCF to be an event that spans the divide between the traditional beer festival and new festivals that have rejected the bad elements of old school festivals but also shunned what is great – like excellent cask conditioned beer. Whether it’s putting the historic Hundred Club alongside bars from Tiny Rebel, Thornbridge and Brass Castle or our Beers From The Wood bar, we want to embrace the best of the old & the new.
But to grow the festival and take it forward, we are looking for new volunteers to join the organising team – people with the skills we need to get better at what we already do, people with new ideas to bring new elements to the festival. If you love beer and cider, that could be YOU……
- Do you have event management or organisational skills?
- Are you experienced in graphic design or marketing?
- Do you have a passion for traditional or modern world beers?
- Are you, or have you been, employed in the pub or brewing industry with the contacts to match?
- Could you lend IT skills to our website and social media?
Whether you are a professional or a self-trained amateur, if you are able to volunteer some of your spare time, there are a wide range of roles where you could help get MBCF to that all important week in January and out the other side.
Keep reading for some examples of specific areas where you could help, or click here to let us know what you think you could add to MBCF.
Design & Marketing
From designing posters to planning our marketing strategy, we’ve come this far largely thanks to enthusiastic amateurs and the odd beer loving professional. For 2020 our partners Drumbeat prepared the majority of our public facing advanced marketing but volunteers took on internal design work developing images for social media, artwork for tickets, banner and more.
If you have experience of marketing large scale events and could advise is on improving what we do, we’d love to hear from you.
Web programming
We try to make our website informative and easy to navigate. But we’d like it to be better with plans for live online beer lists, intergrated volunteering forms and more. Do you have experience with writing, implementing and customising WordPress plug-ins? PHP & Javascript?
Can you find your way through the world of stats that Google Analytics throws out and work out what they mean for website development?
Social Media
Do you follow us on Facebook? We know our Facebook page could get more updates but it’s a task which is currently covered by busy people. Have you run Facebook pages for other organisations? Utilised Facebook advertising and interpreted the feedback? You could help run our Facebook page.
Are you an Insta Wiz? We have been developing our presence in Instagram but again, it’s a role shared by volunteers also concentrating on Twitter & Facebook alongside other roles.
Talks & Tastings
We’ve run a series of tutored tasting events and Meet The Brewers. We’d like to do more of these events, both for the general festival goer and corporate clients who want dedicated events for their staff and customers.
Do you have experience of planning events & a passion for things beery? Contacts in the industry who could deliver tastings, brewers our customers would want to meet? If you could help, get in touch…..
Learning & Discovery
MBCF hosted the first ever pilot of CAMRA’s new festival Learning & Discovery Zones where the public are invited to learn more about how beer & cider are made, be that by seeing ingredients and equipment close up, meeting brewers and industry professionals or by comparative tastings.
Keen homebrewer? Knowledgeable amateur? Industry worker with a passion for expanding other’s knowledge? We need one or more coordinators who can plan what activites we host, organise brewers, cider makers and other industry experts to host sessions and be on hand during the festival to make sure the Discovery Zone is welcoming interested visitors. If you could help, get in touch…..
And lots more….
There’s lots more roles with scope to share with our existing team – shadowing & deputising, advising and improving.
These are just a few of them:
- Sourcing draught and bottled world beers
- Selling sponsorship packages to local businesses
- Preparing site plans in AutoCAD
- Ordering cask and keg beers
- Organising food for volunteers
- Selling VIP packages
- Designing and operating our Games Zone
- Helping manage our online ticketing platform (currently in partnership with EventBrite)
Can you help? Want to know more?
If you think you have something to offer MBCF or want to know more, please let us know by completing the form below.