Hello again Taverners
It feels like a long time ago when we ran our last evening – all about gamification. Hopefully now, the holiday season has come to an end, the kids are back at school and we can get back to the business of having a few beers together and working out how to do more for – or with – our brands and the people who use them, buy them and interact with them.
The next event is on Thursday October the 13th 6:30 for a 7pm start and I’m hoping …

In my mind, all the events that the Fantastic Tavern runs are different and everyone knows about them. Then again, I often think stuff in my head is clear to others and that’s often far from the truth. So here is a run down of the Fantastic Tavern today and how you can be involved.
The Fantastic Tavern itself is the main event. The invites to it go to all the Taverners in the community, all 900+ of you. I try to anticipate what the community would like to have a …

It might appear that it’s all been very quiet at the Fantastic Tavern and that we’ve closed for the summer!
In reality, quite the opposite is true.
After the boisterous evening discussing Gamification, Tom Hopkins from Fortune Cookie and I returned to the Cancer Research UK headquarters, armed with all the ideas that had been generated for them on the night. We met CRUK to help them determine which of the ideas could be developed further and what the value might be. It was a useful exercise as we established measurement criteria …

I stood on the stage and looked across at three floors of Taverners and thought “how the hell did this happen?” 250 people looked back at me, possibly asking the same question. How did we all come to be in a cabaret club listening to presentations about gamification and then spending the rest of our evening ‘working?’
Maybe it is because we fundamentally like work. We like tasks that challenge us, we like laboring to a goal and we like to feel we have achieved something, especially as part of a …

There were moments at the start of this year when I wondered if I should continue to run The Fantastic Tavern. Believe it or not, this seemingly spontaneous and unstructured event takes a lot of planning and organisation. However, I thought I’d throw caution to the wind and do another evening and see how I felt – and how the community felt – afterwards.
Then something happened.
Maybe its the theme of ‘gamification’ that appealed, the lure of a more central location, the whiff of beer or word of mouth hitting a …