Grey Cup Festival 2019

The Grey Cup is the biggest football game in Canada, traveling from year to year. The Grey Cup Festival is a celebration for those football fans complete with team parties, gala awards, a family fun zone, and an infinite amount of sponsorship activations totaling over 40 different events using at least 12 venues of indoor & outdoor space, encompassing over 500,000 sq ft. This  4-day festival, running November 20-23, 2019 invites 350,000  fans from across the country to come together to celebrate the thing they love: football.

In 2019 the 107^th  annual Grey Cup Festival was in Calgary, Alberta. Because Calgary wanted to “experience the energy,” our goal was to put on a festival that was bigger and better than anything that had been done before. There was just one catch. The producers had full-time jobs, so how on earth were they going to add a festival to their docket? The answer was simple – they engaged us to fill out their logistical team. And by January we began to work alongside them filling the role of the technical event producer.

As the technical event producer, our scope of work encompassed:

• Site drawings
• Production schedule
• Logistics tracking
• Developing the site rules and regulations
• Writing the RFP template including the scope of work for the different vendors
• Creating an emergency response plan

This was all created from scratch. Because this event happens in a variety of cities, shared documents are limited,  and historical data is unique to the host market.  The last time Calgary had hosted the Grey Cup was in 2009  so any documents they might have had would be completely outdated. Needless to say, we spent 11 months before the festival creating paperwork to ensure this event went off without a hitch.