News 2021 09 22

Today I'm making a first draft of the blog post about the 2021 Summer Cider Tour, it is below for you to check it out, it should be done into final version within few days.

The cider tour 2021 had several goals. The main aim was to promote Cidrerie Jara ciders and related products in regions where I want to sell in the future. I wanted to meet local people and with their help get in touch with professionals as restaurant and bar managers, wine shop and bio shop owners and persuade them to sell my ciders as one of theirs articles. Because of my previous connections most of the events were held in hackerspaces. The tour has been postponed because of my business but also because of the spread of the new covid 19 variants. At the end I've managed to present around Czech Republic, bit of Germany, Berlin and Switzerland in total in nine places for around one month. Below I'll make summary of what was achieved, what worked well and what I need to improve.

What worked well

What did not work so well

• attendance - big issue. The number of attendants which I need for this type of event to be profitable is between 15 to 25 people. This was the major obstacle during the tour, not enough people were coming to the events. From the nine happenings, there were lets say three where the number of people was fine, the rest was below. I think there were several reasons for this. One the tour was done during holiday season and many people were not present. Second and I think more important, if the event was done through local hackerspace, there was not "members" interested and the word did not reach the wider, local audience. Communication with the organizers was sometimes difficult, with the exact date and time for the event being set too close to the event. The promotion of the event on variety of platforms in general was not sufficient, the graphical design was weak, there was not enough time to promote properly. If I consider places where people showed up, it was either at the project where lots of quite active people are involved, like over 400 people on the mailing list really in touch with the project or there was already existing event of which the cider tasting was just part off. For the future I think I should improve the graphical design of the promotional message, cover more platforms to promote it and do so longer time in advance like three to four weeks. Also I should focus more on food&drink focused projects which has already decent member and follower base, prepare the materials for them but leave the promotion mostly on them because in their region they are much more efficient then me. I do not know of any simple and efficient way how to get in touch with people who may be interested in attending my event in their local social network.