What your event booth says about you

Kevin Lewis: So this talk is called what your event booth says about you. This is gonna take the format of a quiz, and at the end, I will tell you which Mean Girls character you're most like. That is, of course, the joke. This talk because, of course, you need to specify the objects for jokes because people don't know that because it was just so funny. This talk is aimed at both those of you who have never designed event booth before and perhaps contains some good tips for those of you who have.

But first, a quick intro. My name is Kevin Lewis. I'm a senior developer advocate at Deepgram. We are a speech recognition API that lets you get high quality transcripts for both on demand and live audio. And while my experience in developer advocacy spans lots of disciplines, my specialism is definitely in developer events, having run a developer events agency for a few years.

And I'm excited to talk to you today about how you, as event sponsors, can put your best foot forward when designing and delivering your booth experience. So you have just agreed to sponsor an event where there's a booth. Congratulations. That's step one off the list. And while it's very exciting, there's a lot of work to do.

We're gonna be covering what to ask your organizers, making sure your booth does what it needs to at a bare minimum, deciding deciding and designing an enticing hook that will make people actually want to come over, and how you you might be able to reuse a lot of your effort to make supporting events at scale a bit easier. So if you have sponsored events before and you've worked with organizers, you have probably been given some questions and options prompted by them, but that isn't always the case. So I'm now gonna run through some common questions you should be asking absence of them coming your way to make sure that you can design the best booth possible. Firstly, a floor plan. So most organizers will have a floor plan of their venue, and they will have generic spaces where sponsors will, you know, populate them.

And if you are not asked explicitly where you would like to go, you should go ahead and ask, and you should consider things like where are the competitors versus my company. You might not want to be right next to each other or opposite each other or perhaps you do. You can also consider things like, okay. Well, given the schedule, people will be in this room and then they'll be moving to this space for lunch. What's the path they're likely to take, and might we want to be somewhere in that path?

You can do that same exercise for refreshment stations, people leaving and reentering the venue for phone calls, cigarettes, fresh air, whatever. So think about your placement in the floor plan. As part of your sponsorship, you will probably also be given a very defined amount of space, and you should have a good grasp on what that is. It will be something like 10 foot by 10 foot or one trestle table or perhaps a lot bigger. But you need to know what it is because you need to operate within that space, either quite a small space or a huge space, and you need to figure out what to do with it.

There are also some more specific requirements in running a good booth that often aren't held inside of a sponsorship prospectus or a contract. You should ask things like, are you gonna provide power? How much? Are you gonna provide a TV or monitor? Chairs, how many?

Because this will determine whether, one, you need to pay a little more for that or whether you just need to toss it yourself. There is nothing worse than turning up at an event, setting up and going, where's the tv? We were depending on a TV. So you wanna know that well ahead of time. And finally, for this quick set of questions, you should be asking about overnight security.

What what happens with our stuff? You should obviously be taking your really high value items, your laptop, perhaps your high value giveaway of VR kit or whatever it may be. But, you know, your swag collectively has quite a high value, and you wanna know whether you need to pack it down or lock it away if they'll provide that space or whether you need to consider this. But above all else, remember that sponsors and event organizers exist symbiotically. They need your investment to make the event happen, and you need that event to meet some of your goals in order to release that capital.

So talk with your event organizers about exactly what you're trying to achieve, and quite often, they will be able to suggest and support you in meeting those goals because, of course, if you're successful, you're more likely to come back next time. So there are some questions you should be asking organizers if they are not prompting those answers from you. Next, we're gonna talk about what I call the minimum viable booth. And even if you don't do something fancy, even if you're a little bit strapped for time, you should be considering these four items. Firstly, branding.

Branding are things like, having banners behind you. It might be a set of small banners or one large banner and a tablecloth. Also, things that sit on top of the table, often swag, but you might have other items instead. You also need some strong talking points. As developer advocates, I think we all kind of, develop a a kind of very short and rhythmic pattern to describe what our companies do.

Make sure everyone on your booth knows this. Also, have a good demo for those who are interested. Next, and this one, ideally, you should have before you even commit to an event, a very specific set of goals of what that event is trying to do for you. Quite often, outside of the scope of DevRel will be working towards one of three things, awareness, recruitment, or lead generation. Perhaps there's some others, but they're the common three.

So know exactly what your goals are for that event and have appropriate call to actions. Appropriate call to actions isn't only that they're related to your goals, but you don't have just way too many of them. Having lots of call to actions is quite confusing for someone approaching your booth. And finally, staffing. Making sure you have enough staff factoring in breaks that are definitely needed.

Making sure they're goal appropriate. If your goal in this event is recruitment, then you wanna send someone along from your talent team. If it is sales, you wanna send along a salesperson or a sales engineer as well as you. And finally, attitude, which might feel like a hostile word, but do remember that booth duty is hours of being very extroverted, having lots of conversations and not everyone is well equipped or willing to do this. So make sure people who you are sending to the event knows what is expected of them and have a reasonable opt out.

Because if they're not well suited to do that, you're just gonna make everyone unhappy and not get the result you want. And on this minimum viable booth, I wanna talk about the little details that I will spot from a mile away, and I think many other organizer and many other attendees would as well. Iron your banners and tablecloths. I will see a crinkly banner from across the room and chances are if you're at an event venue, you probably have a hotel room and that hotel probably has an iron, a hand iron either in your room or you can request it from reception. Get it, take it to your venue and iron your tablecloth or take your tablecloth to your room and iron it there.

Even if it's brand new and shouldn't have that many creases in it, it will be folded and compressed as you ship it. So just give it a quick iron, it goes a long way. You also wanna have a bit of a Goldilocks situation going on with the amount of booth that's, the amount of swag that's on your table on your booth. You want there to be enough that people don't feel like they're taking from a very limited supply, yet not so much that it just looks completely cramped. You might also consider creating some rules for a clean and tidy table.

I once worked for a company that had a rule that you are only allowed to have bottled water, or, you know, a glass of water on the table at any point in time. You want soda? Absolutely fine. You want a coffee? Not a problem, but it just sits underneath the booth out of you, and then your table doesn't look like it just has a bunch of trash on it.

That's just an example. You may consider rules like this, though, to create a consistent, organized, and tidy looking booth. So these are the things that you need basically no matter what. But you also may need a hook, a reason for people to want to, you know, come over and have a conversation with you. And when they are there, that you meet their expectations.

So now I'm gonna run through some common hooks and hopefully in here, there'll be some good nuggets, some good ideas that you can take away and apply. The first one is actually a bit of a get out. Certain companies, you are just well known to developers. Well done. Congrats for working for those companies.

You might not need a hook. Just physically being there might be enough. That isn't most of us though, so I'll assume this isn't the case for the rest of these items. Demos are really interesting to run on your booth, generally on a screen. What matters here is that someone can see this demo happening from far away.

That might be in the design of the demo, it might be visually interesting, it might sound interesting Or, the person who's working on the booth might have a really good ability to hold a crowd, and then people have a fear of missing out, they may well also stroll on over. TwilioQuest here in the background is a great example of quite a novel or a tool that can be used as quite a novel demo. You don't generally see these kind of 16 bit RPGs on these screens. So, you know, think of things like that. You may also think about novel ways to have people come to your booth and engage with it.

This could be things like novel items to take photos with, like big mascots or the the balls where you stick your face through and take the photo. Do you remember those when you were in the real world when we were stuck at home? Fun games, on demand spike creation. Like, you know, I've seen people screen print T shirts on on the spot. Well, just a really strong and coherent theme that is interesting and people wanna come and engage with.

At your booth, very much dependent on the size of your team and your space, your actual booth space, might consider creating your own schedule of activities. That could be talks or workshops you're gonna run at your booth alongside the event's own schedule. It might be special or celebrity appearances. Or here in the case of the New Relic team, they do live streaming from some events that they've been at, which I think is really interesting because they could have community members come and kind of, just take part in those on the spot should they wish. Now this category, I think, is one that many of us have thought of before, which I'm calling conveniences, functions, and services.

And these are nice parts of the event that your attendees will rely on or expect, but you're the one making them available. And these are about providing comfort and an all round better experience. Things are like things that fit into this category are like, having a coffee barista available at your booth, charging stations, comfortable seating areas, or a couple of times I've seen soundproofed call booths. I mean, we all go to events. We need to sometimes take that odd call from our day job, and it's always awkward to find a place to do it.

You could be the company that provides that at a future event. And probably the one that is most straightforward and expected, some form of giveaway item. This could be swag that people just grab from the table and walk away with, or it could be a raffle, where raffles normally are either completely randomized or there is some kind of top score element. You're trying to do more than anyone else. You're trying to earn more points than anyone else, and you get the giveaway item.

Just a quick aside on swag, some questions to ask yourself. Is this actually gonna be used, or is someone gonna take it, and is it gonna end up in landfill? Is it even desirable or are you gonna just be lumped with a bunch of extra swag items at the end and needing to figure out what to do with them? The third one's quite interesting. You know, will it drive interest?

Is it a cute beanie or a pin or something that other attendees can immediately see and desire because then they can be sent over to your booth. But above all else, remember that the amount of effort you expect your attendees, your audience to spend to get an item, to get the payoff needs to be less, than what they perceive the payoff to be. How much effort am I really gonna put in for a t shirt? And remember that the values that they place is probably less than the value you place. You know the unit cost of that hoodie, that tech organizer, they don't.

And one tip to try and help with this is having multiple items of swag at different price points. You know, decide what a low value and high value item might be and have both. You know, stickers and pins are cheap. Beanies, hoodies, tech organizers, they're less affordable. So you can have these items and maybe be a little more guarded around how some of them are released to attendees.

So we've spoken about designing a booth. Now let's talk about making that effort reusable by designing a a reusable kit that you can send to many events. And before we do this, just a a question to ask yourself. Do you even need a kit? Realistically, you're probably not just supporting a single event on a whim.

It's probably part of a wider initiative that you've planned upfront, so you'll know whether you're gonna attend very few events or a ton of events. And if you're not doing many, consider just renting a lot of these items if you can, or work with other teams like field marketing or a general events team and see what they do and if you could just replicate their efforts directly. Let's say you are gonna do a kit for a moment. The first thing you wanna ask yourself when designing this reusable kit is how much effort is it gonna take people to go from this kit that I'm going to ship to a working booth? How much time is it gonna take to set it up and tear it down?

Is it particularly complex? Not just in terms of actual steps required, but is every member of your team gonna be able to do them all? I'm having memories of setting up the five or seven pane c curve panel c curve banners with the vinyl sheets that you have to hook on the top. You need to be quite tall to get those to work. You need to be able to put it together.

Not everyone is. Consider that. Does it require any ongoing maintenance between or during events? Next, think about how you are going to effectively use the space that you have. So in this picture here, this is a Microsoft booth from a tech education expo called, BET And at this event, they always have a huge space and they always set up either a mini theater or a little classroom like this to run workshops from.

A really clever way to make the most of the space they have. But using space effectively doesn't just mean attendee facing. It can also mean things like storage for your team. Can you build that into your booth? Can you build in a little locked hidden area where you can throw your bags?

Also consider that the requirements of your booth at every event are not the same. Sometimes you will need to do quite a lot or you'll have a lot of team members. You'll have the ability to do a lot. And other times, that would be different. The way I like to do this is build a reasonably lightweight course set which will go to every event and then build a few building blocks that you can choose to send to an event or not depending on what that event needs.

And we're almost done with this section, but also consider the reproducibility and durability of your events and of your, booth kits and how they relate to the amount of effort per event. If you can spend the effort to design a booth once and then reuse that work, the average the average effort per event falls through the floor. For example, you design the manufacture banners and table cloths, you order a supply of swag, and you design a process to get things from point a to point b. You only need to do that once, and then the effort between supporting five events and 20 events are not hugely different. When we think about durability, think about how likely things are to break or go missing and how you can increase the durability of the items you're sending about in your booth.

Because as well as less maintenance, less time, there's also less waste when your booth kits are more durable. And my tip here is, more for those of you who don't know, there are vendors who will store your swagon event kits and handle the logistics to get them and send them, to sorry. Send them and return them from events. Remember, shipping is complex, especially internationally. So if you aren't that good at international shipping, maybe some of us are, but if you're not that good at it, just know where your strengths lack and just delegate it away.

A lot of these companies, you can just tell them what to send, where and when, and they'll handle it going, and they'll handle it coming back. Now I did promise a quick, bit on event, booths as they act in online events. And there's really only one takeaway I want you to have here, which is passive engagement tools that don't require you there to be effective are wicked, and active engagement, it it's not it doesn't suck. It just takes a lot of energy. I spent hours in this pandemic, sat in video rooms waiting for a second person to turn up.

Sucks up my time, and energy, and I could be doing something else with that time instead. So a couple of examples. When I worked at Vonage, we created this, the video API challenge. Users participate in this to enter into a raffle. They follow the steps which involve signing up for an account, putting in some keys in that little code editor.

They fill in the form at the bottom so we definitely know that, this person is at this event because we would spin up a version per event, stores it in a database, spits them out on a page which not only demonstrates the small amount of code required to get that working, but also automatically validates it was done successfully and enters them into a raffle. And this was based on the login API challenge by the Auth0 team, with the blessing of the developer advocate who built it, Ben Decroy. TwilioQuest, again, is another amazing tool. You can absolutely kind of host a game of TwilioQuest, a session of it. But, also, it can be this passive experience.

You can set it going, explain the rules of engagement, and then just let it go. Really good. So that brings me to the end of this short talk. I've got kind of the summary here, which I'll pop in the Discord and I'll tweet as well. But you might be asking yourself how to create these booths, and these are some questions you should be asking, some considerations you should be making.

As I did promise, my shameless plug, I run this, Discord community for developer event organizers. Just small right now, but come make it less small and we will talk about running developer events. It's free to join as events that run once a month and you can access that at eventhandler.community. And that is me coming up on time. Boom.

Thank you.