Helping New Zealand comedy thrive for the future
New Zealand Comedy Trust · 2024
Strategy · Organisational development · Funding · Partnerships advisory
The Festival and my mahi at a glance
3-year commitments secured from key funders and partners
150,000+ attendances across the 2024 and 2025 Festivals
600+ performances across 120+ show seasons in 2025
$10.66m economic benefit generated by the 2024 Festival.
The challenge: Building stability behind an ambitious creative programme
The New Zealand Comedy Trust is central to Aotearoa's comedy sector, producing the NZ International Comedy Festival while also supporting artists, developing audiences, and creating pathways for sustainable careers in comedy.
Despite operating in a challenging funding environment while delivering an ambitious national programme, the Trust needed to strengthen revenue certainty, demonstrate its value to funders and partners, and ensure its internal planning and systems supported effective delivery.
Across the 2024 and 2025 Festivals, more than 150,000 audience members attended, with the 2025 programme alone comprising 120+ show seasons, 600+ performances, and around 200 comedians across Auckland and Wellington.
My role and approach: Strengthening the Trust by connecting strategy, funding, partnerships, and impact
As a Strategic Advisor, I worked alongside the Trust's leadership team, spanning organisational planning, funding, strategic and commercial partnerships, and impact across the 2024 and 2025 Festival cycles.
My role combined strategic advice with hands-on delivery. I reviewed and supported the development of the operational plan, identifying opportunities to strengthen priorities and systems, streamline processes, and uncover new ways of working.
I advised on commercial and strategic partnerships and developed major funding applications for Creative New Zealand and Tātaki Auckland Unlimited, translating the Trust's purpose, programmes, and contribution to the sector into compelling investment cases.
My approach was to connect the different parts of the organisation rather than treating strategy, operations, funding, and partnerships as separate entities.
The evidence demonstrated the Festival's impact extended well beyond ticket sales. In 2024, independent analysis estimated the Festival generated $10.66 million in gross economic benefit, while more than 75,000 people experienced live comedy through the Festival.
In Auckland, the Festival also accounted for 26% of Q Theatre's annual audience and 27% of its annual hospitality revenue, demonstrating its wider contribution to the venues and businesses that form part of the comedy ecosystem.
My work moved deliberately between strategy and execution: advising leadership, reviewing plans and partnership opportunities, improving systems and processes, writing funding applications, and producing the practical materials needed to turn organisational priorities into action.
The impact: More certainty, a clearer story, and a stronger foundation for growth
My funding and partnership work contributed directly to securing three-year commitments from key funders and partners, providing greater revenue certainty and a stronger foundation for longer-term planning and delivery.
Internally, improvements to systems, processes and operational planning created clearer ways of working, strengthened organisational capability, and improved operational efficiency.
Throughout the period I supported the Trust, the Festival maintained a significant audience scale, with 75,000+ attendees in both 2024 and 2025. In 2025, it delivered more than 600 performances across 120+ show seasons, featuring around 200 comedians across Auckland and Wellington.
The result speaks for itself: greater funding certainty, stronger partnership positioning, better evidence of impact, and more effective internal systems to support delivery.