Angel Food Conference

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.