employers' tips
Recommendations to Exhibitors
We offer you the following suggestions as ways to maximize your experience as an exhibitor.
- Have at least one of the people who is staffing your booth be an individual with a disability.
If you are an employer, invite one or more of your existing employees with a disability to staff your exhibit. If you are a service provider, have an existing employee with a disability and/or one of more of your (current or former) clients staffing your exhibit. There is no better way to communicate your inclusiveness and “disability friendliness” than demonstrating it in this way. Also, we expect to have a lot of young people with disabilities attending. It will only enhance their experience to see and meet other people with disabilities who are successful in their various careers.
- Regularly rotate the people who are staffing your exhibit.
This is particularly applicable to employers and we learned this from a savvy recruiter from Nike. A lot of the reason that companies are not successful in recruiting more people with disabilities is because of the discomfort and misinformation harbored by current employees. The Expo can be a terrific tool for enlightening key people in your company. Rather than having two people spend all day in your exhibit consider having several people taking 1 – 2 hour shifts throughout the day. Both the experience of meeting people who come to your booth and the opportunity to later browse the other exhibits will go a long way to increase the awareness and comfort that your employees have about inviting people with disabilities to be more present in your workplace.
- Communicating with Attendees Who are Deaf.
Some of the Expo attendees are certain to be people who are Deaf or have hearing loss. On a website called Trade Show Insights, we found a great little audio clip with advice for exhibitors on how to effectively communicate with attendees who are Deaf.
