Hello everyone!
I hope everyone has been having a great Vancouver Craft Beer Week. I have gotten out to a few events and have been having a blast. I have had the chance to speak to some of our members out and about in the city throughout the week and I have been very humbled by the kind words of support we have received as a team so far. This Executive team is one that is totally unlike what has been at the helm in the past few years.
We are taking a lot of the old stuff that worked and are keeping it, but have added a few new things as well. One promise we committed ourselves to when we started this year was to send out a members survey to make sure everyone was having a chance for their voices to be heard. I am pleased to say that we got a great response to that survey. While I do not have time to go through every single response, I can certainly touch on some of the most common responses we have heard from members thus far. Here we go!
This is by far the most common piece of feedback we received in our survey and it makes sense! We are the Campaign for Real Ale, after all. Many of our members are partial to traditional styles and traditional brewing. This is not an easy one to tackle either, because it isn’t as easy as just hosting cask nights. In the years past, we have hosted cask nights, but we found our members simply did not come out. That’s not meant to place the blame on our membership base in the slightest. In fact, it means our team needs to sit down and re-strategize how these events are being packaged, advertised, delivered and repeated. I view this one as a challenge – luckily I like a challenge!
More Members Only Events
This is something we have already started working on.
Last month, we had a new-members Olympic Village pub crawl. This was an event exclusive to newer members (within the last 3 months) and allowed us to get to know our freshest community members. We plan on having similar events once a quarter to welcome our new members and show them how much fun the CAMRA community can be. In terms of special events for members as a whole, we have already had a few, including our Merchant’s Oyster Bar pairing dinner and our CAMRA Members early access to VCBW’s Gigantabiroomcobaltapalooza event! At the latter, our members had early access to two amazing casks and many of the areas finest beers on tap before being joined by the greater VCBW scene! It was awesome!
Advocacy. Another difficult one. Since we took over in February, 
we have worked hard to try and decipher the new Government’s Liquor Reform. The best part was receiving the Government’s summary report and having everything except the Table of Contents redacted! #NailedIt. Now that the reform is set in stone and not going to change – according to the government (despite valiant efforts by David Eby and the official opposition to show how consumers are being made a fool.) We need to shift our focus towards other initiatives.
Are you interested in advocacy work? Do you have an idea that you would love to see CAMRA Vancouver take on? Vice President Kerry wants to hear from you! Shoot him a line at vp@camravancouver.ca to tell him what you think.
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