The Angel Food Conference & Education Series (AFC) is a one-day angel conference featuring a panel discussion, pitch competition, and food fair. The OEN Angel Food Fund represents the state’s first fund designed exclusively for Oregon’s valuable food and beverage sector.
We held the inaugural OEN Angel Food Conference at The Redd East in Portland, Oregon. If you haven’t been to an event at this venue yet, you should! The event took place on June 19, 2019, and was hosted by Founder and CEO of Green Zebra, Lisa Sedlar.
240+ attendees, 13 food and beverage companies, 10 speakers, four live-streamed workshops, live music and a hydroponic farm exhibit.
Thanks to PR firm Lawrence Public Relations, this one-of-a-kind event was featured on KPTV12 and KGW’s Tonight With Cassidy.
I addition to planning and executing marketing efforts for this event, I photographed it, too, and a few of my shots were shown during the KGW spot. You can see my brief event recap on the OEN blog.
The Team
Executive Director | Maggie Finnerty |
Program Manager | Susan Laarman |
MarCom Manager | Miles Shattuck (me) |
The Numbers
Attendees | 240+ |
Fund Amount Raised (Goal: $100k) | $150,000 |
Speakers included:
- Michelle Cairo (Olympia Provisions)
- Jaime Danek (Humm Kombucha)
- Christy Goldsby (Honey Mama’s)
- Ben Jacobsen (Jacobsen Salt)
- Jill Keuhler (Freeland Spirits)
- Jake Kindrachuk (Village Family Capital)
- Jon Maroney (Oregon Venture Fund)
- Shannon Oliver (Red Duck Foods)
- McConnell Smith (VMG Partners)
Pitching companies included:
- A Cajun Life/Our Life Foods
- Hazel People
- Hibisbloom by La Casserole Gourmet
- Honey Palette
- Honeybee Sparkling Lemonades & Syrups
- Josie’s Best Gluten Free Mixes
- Liv Bar
- Mathilde’s Kitchen
- Mindful Proteins
- Proud Label
- Riff Cold Brewed Coffee
- Swift Cider
- Swiss Rossi
Webcast + Social
We offered a series of workshops leading up to the conference to help entrepreneurs prepare for the pitch competition. To reach more entrepreneurs across the state, we live-streamed the workshops. I got some great training and produced a total of four interactive webcasts as part of the OEN Angel Food Program.
By the way, if you want to broadcast stunning live video events to digital audiences, check out Brandlive.
What is a “webcast?” A webcast is a media presentation distributed over the Internet using streaming media technology. In other words: Web + Broadcast = Webcast.
Webcasting presented good opportunities to capture content for social media. The Instagram posts created while webcasting the workshops had some of the highest engagement rates of the year. In fact, one post I put together while webcasting ranks as OEN’s #1 most-liked Instagram post of 2019.
OEN’s most-liked Instagram post of 2019 Behind the scenes workshop preperation Thanks to John at Brandlive for the webcast training and support! Example of a webcast