This is a thread intended to collect the lessons we’ve learnt from having our booth at the IGF this year. It is primarily meant for us who participated in staffing the booth, but we are of course also happy for input from passerbys, or people with similar experiences from other conferences.
Some of my initial observations:
Staffing
- Having a printed staffing schedule at the booth is crucial to make sure the booth is staffed, and to allow activists to sign up to help out throughout the conference.
- We should strive to always be a minimum of two people at the booth at any one time. This makes staying at the booth more pleasant, and also makes the booth more approachable.
- Having people staff the booth in their own clothes is better than uniform t-shirts or something similar. It makes people look and feel like themselves, rather than salespersons, and it makes it easy to go in and out of the role of staffing the booth, when needed.
Merch and promotion material
- We shold definitely make sure to have plenty of branded giveaways at the stand. The best merch is probably stickers (benefits: they are small, so easy to bring, and easy for people to put on their laptops) and small practical items that people will actually use (pens, bottle openeres, usb-sticks, etc).
- It would be good to have a generic flyer about the European Pirates that we could always bring, as well as thematic flyers that can be adopted to the topic of the conference. No need for large quantitites, as most people don’t actively pick flyers here, but it makes the booth look more interesting when there’s things to look at while there.
