We recently had a new Ancestry exhibit designed and built for the 2017-2018 conference seasons. I’d never been involved with this before, so I had a steep learning curve. I would like to share some of the things I learned throughout this process.
#1 Ask other exhibitors who designed their exhibit. There are many companies that will design booths, and I explored several, but in the end, we chose someone that was a referral from another company. These are some things to ask others when seeking a referral:
- Does the designer have new and innovative ideas?
- Is the designer easy to work with?
- Are they responsive?
- What other services do they offer?
- Will they store the booth for you?
- Will they travel and assemble it for you if necessary?
- Will they fix things quickly?
#2 Know what you want before you reach out to the designer. The process is much smoother if you can tell them what you are looking for. My manager and I had several conversations about what we wanted in the new booth. Some questions to consider:
- What size booth do we need?
- Since we use it at several conferences, and our booth space is never the same, we needed something that was versatile, and could be configured to fit a 40’ x 40’, 20’ x 50’ 10’ x 20’, etc.
- What are we going to do in our booth?
- Since we need computers to access Ancestry on, that was a major consideration.
- We also offer in-booth demos, so we needed something that could hold a TV.
- We need more storage besides just what we have under our tables.
- We wanted something to catch people’s eyes at the front of the booth
- We wanted activities in our booth that attendees could engage with, to help draw them into our booth
- What activities can we offer that people will remember when they go home?
- Does the booth have a good flow, or is it closed off and uninviting?
- What are our shipping needs?
- Should we continue to ship our booth on pallets, or should we invest in some crates that provide a lot more protection for our equipment, but are more expensive to ship?
- These are just a sample of some of the questions we asked as we were designing our new space
#3 Be very clear when expressing your desires to your designer. Sometimes I had a vision of something, but didn’t always convey that to him effectively. This caused a few revisions that could have been avoided had I been more specific.
#4 Ask questions about the booth:
- Will I need to hire labor to assemble it, or will I be able to do it myself with help from a couple other employees?
- Do I have room to store the booth in my current storage area?
- How tall or wide are some of the elements? When you look at the images created by the designer, it’s hard to get the right perspective of how large something actually is by just looking at the images.
This was an exciting process, to design a new booth from scratch. However, it was also a good learning experience for me. I hope these suggestions will help you as you consider creating a new booth, whether you are designing a new exhibit, no matter what the size.
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