CHEERS 2022!

It’s that time of year again! The time where we take a second to look back on the year and reflect on what has happened.

What a year 2022 has been! We started our year off strong by giving out the donated care packages to the homeless as part of our ‘Winter Warmth’ campaign with ‘Only A Pavement Away’. We raised over £8000 for this campaign, and we cannot wait to see how much we raise in 2023. The Winter Warmth appeal has returned this January, head down to your local TODAY to donate!

For the love of beer! February certainly was the month of love in 2022 with Craft Union! Not only did we run some brilliant valentine’s events, our communities also shared the love by getting involved with our ‘Love Your Local’ campaign and nominated some great community projects for funding in their local communities. The successful nominations had some life changing impacts on some of our Crafty customers and really showed that community is at the heart of all of our pubs. It shouldn’t have been a shock to us when in March we WON the ‘Best Community Pub Operator’ at the 2022 Publican Awards! What an AMAZING achievement!

We continued on with our community campaigns with an ‘Easter Egg Appeal’ in April. Our lovely Crafty communities helped the Easter bunny this year by donating eggs to our pubs, ready to be donated to children less fortunate on Easter day! Our pubs also held some pretty fun parties and decorated their pubs with some Sp-egg-tacular decorations!

We were fortunate enough to celebrate the Queens Jubilee throughout June in 2022 before her passing later on in the year. One of the most special parts of any Royal Jubilee is seeing how it brings people together, this weekend felt extra special, given how we weren’t able to be together during the pandemic. We celebrated the Queen in true Craft Union style with some ‘Right’- Royal’ parties throughout the bank holiday weekend. In the sad month of September, we kept our doors open for our community and to show our support for our customers.

Armed Forces Day and Remembrance days are always well celebrated with Craft Union. This year showed TV takeovers in our pubs with images of veterans and soldiers, some great decorations and most importantly, some amazing events to remember those who served our country.

MNDA was our chosen charity this year. Our Crafty community have been busy putting on lots of events to raise money for Motor Neurone disease. Some highlights have been global MND awareness day on 21st June, family fun days such as the Brown Cow’s where they raised £495, a charity walk involving multiple Craft Union pubs, the total raised was £5,200 for this and the FP&A team climbing Snowdon for MNDA and raising over £4,500!

We also had an exciting year of yummy drink offers from our refreshing summer serves to our exciting sports bucket deals and beer towers to our spooky dead mans fingers shots and festive Christmas cocktails! There was something for everyone in 2022.

You supported your sport this year and joined us in your local to enjoy live sport whilst enjoying a drink from one of our NEW sport offers! From the Guinness Six Nations kicking off for all of our rugby fans in February and Crafty race days like Cheltenham festival, Grand National, Epsom Derby and Royal Ascot, to witnessing the amazing result of the lionesses bringing it home for the women’s euros and then the heartbreak of England loosing against France in the world cup. You watched it all from the comfort of your favourite Crafty local! #getinforthewin

The list goes on and on! 2022 welcomed many new pub openings and some of you attended our successful recruitment events. You also helped us reach over 2k followers on Instagram and we ended off the year in December with lots of festive events and community campaigns such as Santa’s Sack. Last December, our Crafty community donated 12,900 sacks as part of our Toy Appeal which supported families, children living in hardship and local children’s hospitals. This was an AMAZING achievement, and we cannot wait to see how many sacks we filled and donated in 2022.

A HUGE Crafty thank you to all of our locals, followers and amazing Crafty community. 2022 has been an amazing year, we look forward to seeing what 2023 will bring us!