Maine Brewers’ Guild Issues Digital RFP
We want to remake our digital presence to reflect the same standards as our beer. Currently, our website is brutally basic. We are looking for a firm that can help us craft and execute a digital strategy that includes a complete website rebuild with strong mobile presence to help meet the needs of beer drinkers/consumers visiting Maine’s craft breweries.
Our goals for our digital presence are to:
- Be the easiest, mobile-ready option to view most accurate, up-to-date info on all breweries in Maine
- Engage & excite people to visit more of our breweries
- Drive beer tourism among visitors to Maine
- Promote guild events
- Provide good presence for Allied members (vendors/partners who pay to support guild as sponsors)
- Promote strength and importance of craft beer in Maine to legislators
- Key repository of high level facts for press/media and other interested parties
Background:
The Maine Brewers’ Guild is a nonprofit, trade association for Maine’s beer brewers. The Maine Brewers’ Guild was established to promote and protect the craft beer industry in Maine. We are dedicated to keeping Maine in the forefront of the craft beer revolution by promoting, protecting, convening, and strengthening brewers and our industry.
The Maine Brewers’ Guild is the trade association for Maine’s beer brewers. It is a 501(c)6 nonprofit registered in the state of Maine. For more than 20 years, the Guild has served to unite Maine’s brewers, promote their products, and protect our industry at the legislative level. Today, Maine’s craft beer industry is stronger than ever before – thousands of people flock to our state to follow the Maine Beer Trail, attend our brewfests, and visit our breweries and brewpubs, which now operate in all sixteen counties. The Maine Brewers’ Guild is the unified voice of Maine’s craft beer industry. Our revenue comes predominantly from our consumer and B2B events (90%), as well as membership dues (10%). Looking at 2018 and beyond, our two strategic goals are to become the number one destination in the United States for craft beer tourists, as well as prove the craft beer industry to be a model industry for Maine’s next economy.
Scope of Work:
Key functionality for digital presence:
- Compelling, inspiring landing page that is graphically rich and excites people about Maine breweries and our industry.
- Make our “Beer Trail” (geographical listings of breweries) easily viewable on mobile and website, to help drive more visitation to more breweries. Currently this is the most visited information on our site.
- Ability to create ‘driving tours’ or ‘itineraries’ for visiting breweries (OK to link to Google Maps API)
- Robust, searchable member brewery content pages including listings with hours, events, and potentially different features/attributes (e.g. dog friendly, food trucks, walkable, etc.).
○ Separately recommend if there are ways to make these pages editable by 3rd parties – i.e. the breweries themselves – securely, easily, and affordably.
- Engaging information about guild events, including text, photos, video. Capable of easily incorporating “widgets” (i.e. Eventbrite ticket sales).
- Integration of guild social media feeds (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter).
- Mobile presence — at a minimum must be adaptive site (though also seeking input/recommendation on a separate app, more info below)
- Security. Current site is regularly under attack from overseas “bots.” Though we think of ourselves as low-profile (and do not store any PII or financial information), our Google Suite account is linked to Maine Brewers domain, and we need to ensure that site is as secure as feasible.
- SEO-minded outcome – to ensure key pages (e.g. beer trail, brewery info pages, map of Maine breweries, event info) will be well indexed by search engines.
- Resist overlapping tourism info with VisitMaine website, instead point to key resources for permalinks to VisitMaine.com
Due Date:
June 13th, 2018
Address:
Firms with relevant experience could include Finn Partners and Rubenstein PR.
