Replacing paper and guesswork at live exhibitions
Anderson Education runs exhibitions where families meet schools face to face. We built the bespoke platform that now runs each event, from registration through to the record of who spoke to whom.
The challenge
The exhibitions worked, but the process around them leaned on an ageing third-party system and a good deal of paper. Families registered, arrived and spoke to schools, and afterwards nobody could say reliably which families had spoken to which exhibitors.
The schools paying to exhibit needed a reliable record of those conversations, both to follow up with families and to understand the value of attending.
Constraints
Events are immovable and the environment is unforgiving. On the day there is a hall, variable connectivity, exhibitors who have not used the system before and no opportunity to postpone.
Our approach
Anything we built had to be obvious to use with no training and had to fail gracefully when the network did. We designed the on-stand flow first and worked backwards to registration.
Each exhibition generates its own registration form, allowing one platform to serve every event without a separate build.
What we built
Registration and QR codes
Families register in advance and arrive with a QR code, so the conversation at the stand starts without anyone writing anything down.
On-the-day scanning
Exhibiting schools scan a code and the family details appear immediately, while Anderson watches scan activity move across the event as it happens.
Technical detail
The platform is built around events as first-class objects, so a new exhibition can be set up through configuration with no development work required.
Scanning was designed for poor connectivity: capture works offline and reconciles when the signal returns, because a hall full of people is the worst possible place to discover a dependency on the network.
Attendee data is scoped tightly, so an exhibitor sees the families who chose to speak to them and nobody else.
- TypeBespoke event platform
- Key featureQR registration and scanning
- ResilienceOffline capture with reconciliation
- ReportingLive scan activity per event
- AccessPer-exhibitor data scoping
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