Sure, you refresh your show or reposition a couple of elements every year. But how often do attendees or exhibitors notice and, more importantly, is it driving attendance or exhibit sales?

At the International Sign Association’s (ISA) 18,000-attendee meeting, the International Sign Expo, the organization’s two member groups — national sign companies and local custom sign installers — are largely segregated, attending different sessions and interacting with different vendors. Many small custom sign installers may never run into the national sign companies who could give them recession-busting business. So, to ensure that they make those important connections, ISA last year launched a special event to bring together its National Sign Company(NSC) and Custom Sign Company (CSC) membership divisions.

Part of the New Orleans’ Ernest N.Morial Convention Center’s greening
effort (a partnership with the city started in 2007 in response to
client demand) called for 210 new recycling bins for paper, plastic and
waste. But instead of sending the existing trash cans to the landfill, convention center employees stepped forward to repurpose and reuse the old ones, saving the center more than $100,000 and diverting mounds of nonbiodegradable fiberglass cans from the local landfill.

Consumer interest in health and wellness continues to spike, and retailers attending the New York International Gift Fair (NYIGF) wanted more from the show to help them embrace the trend. Show organizer dmg world media was more than happy to oblige. In the past year, NYIGF organizers placed a special focus on expanding Extracts, the show’s personal care, beauty and wellness division. The result? The section has seen a 30 percent uptick in exhibitors, with 100 companies slated to exhibit at this summer’s show, compared with 60 in 2008.

As attendees and show organizers both know, sometimes the morning after an evening party or gala can be brutal. Take a cue from EXPO’ssister magazine, Event Marketer, and attract slow-moving attendees the next day with the siren song of hangover food — cold pizza and Bloody Mary’s.

Thinking about co-locating your event because the show is struggling? Forget it. Considering co-locating to save yourself some work or money? Wrong again. Thinking about co-locating just to build a bigger audience? Won’t work. There are plenty of good reasons to co-locate but these aren’t them.

Most large trade shows contract with outside floor managers to help exhibitors with move-in and move-out and to troubleshoot show-floor problems. But the National Association for the Specialty Food Trade (NASFT) which hosts the Fancy Food Show in New York each summer takes it one step further using floor managers as valued partners that help build sales revenue communicate important messages to exhibitors and maintain a high level of customer service across the show.

Tourism CVB and other destination executives are hungry to build relationships with event planners from Experient (www.experient-inc.com) a third-party provider of meeting and event services that plans thousands of meetings and trade shows each year for its clients. So at EnVision Experient’s annual corporate trade show industry professionals representing hotels CVBs and other service providers clamor for the attention of Experient staff. To help ensure exhibitors get face time with the staffers representing the events they’re interested in Experient uses a different tack: a reverse trade show. “It gives exhibitors another chance to reach out to people they didn’t see during the traditional trade show ” explains Jennifer Sari Manager of Partner Relations for Experient.

The average trade show attendee produces 61 pounds of solid waste at a three-day conference compared to 13.5 pounds of waste generated during a three-day period at home according to a 2008 white paper authored by green meeting consultants at MeetGreen. But it doesn’t have to be that way. At the International Sign Expo (ISE) in April attendees produced less waste and avoided lugging heavy tote bags of trade show paraphernalia by using the Virtual Totebag a new product from BDMetrics that allows attendees to take it all home — digitally.

Marshall Lipson was tired of attending so-called paperless conferences that required attendees to wait in lines to print their agendas or send home CDs of PDFs to be printed later. So the Managing Director of Professional Development at the Society of Financial Service Professionals (SFSP) set out to develop a truly paperless conference.

For AFCOM, streamlined exhibitor management didn’t just make exhibitors happy — it also helped the show build new revenue streams and grow its attendance and exhibit space. The association, which supports the data center industry, has generated nearly $1 million in additional revenue in the three years since implementing its new online exhibitor system. And by investing that revenue into marketing and growing the show, AFCOM has increased its attendance by 60 percent and net square feet of exhibit space by more than 50 percent, from 20,900 net square feet in 2005 to 33,700 net square feet in 2007.