Abigail is the Sales and Marketing Manager for Vikre Distilling as well as the Founder of a Minnesota nonprofit geared towards feminist empowerment. Abigail shares her advice for breaking into marketing consulting and walks us through the process of organizing FEmn Fest, a weekend festival “of empowerment through music, art, films, workshops, education, and connection.”
Transcript
My name is Abigail Mlinar and for a living I do marketing consulting, event production, and I run a non-profit. So somebody could come to me and say I don't have my own marketer in house, which is first step, most folks don't, second, I have this issue that I need addressed, which could be let's do a search marketing program for you, let's do social pay per click marketing for you or let's talk about strategy and how we can reach your goals in a big picture sense and often times I'll be making marketing plans for folks where we are incorporating all of the different channels through which they could market their business or their product or their service and we make a cohesive communication plan for that and they now have a tool that they can show to somebody on their team to complete the steps, but they use me to make the strategy for them. With my feminist activism world that I had developed, I was approached with an idea, and I developed it into, with a team of other people, this festival that just happened last weekend called FEmn Fest. We organized it from March til the event happened in September of this year and we had a successful first year event that did better than most events would do in their third year so feel really good about it. We ended up making it women vendors, women artists, women educators, and it ended up being kind of a retreat type of event where there's workshops and performances and interactive art installations, but the steps were a cool process for me because I had worked in event production for a while, but for somebody else's organization, so now my business, my freelance consulting firm was the financial backer for a festival that first step is to try to get funding so it was fun for me to be applying for my first grant ever and fortunately got it and got sponsors and figured out who the parties would be that were involved. I got a team around us that were other women in events and women in music and developed it into a successful first event.
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