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Registration: Tips for assigning booth spaces & plots
Registration: Tips for assigning booth spaces & plots

Learn how to set up registration to handle booth space and/or plot assignments for your event.

Updated over a week ago

Conferences, expos, street fairs, and festivals are just a few types of events that must often manage booth spaces and/or plot assignments to certain types of registrants. Let's be clear, this is no easy task!

This article will provide some helpful tips and best practices to make assigning booth spaces & plots at your event much easier.

Numbered booths or Assigned booths?

There are two main approaches to selling booths in ClearEvent. You'll need to determine which approach is best for your event.

Numbered booths:

If you have an inventory of numbered booth locations that you wish to sell and you would like the registrant to choose the exact booth location at the time of registration, you'll want to set up Booth fees to sell your booths.

With this approach, each booth can be assigned a unique booth number, size, price, floor, section, booth type, and description. Once a numbered booth is sold, it cannot be purchased by another registrant.

For example, you could add a single Booth fee type, and then on the Booths tab, add each unique booth that is available to sell and configure each of them.

Assigned booths:

If your event needs to sell booths but won't assign actual booth locations until some time after registrations are received, you can set up Standard fees to sell common booth types.

For example, you could add a single Standard fee type to your registration form to sell 10'x10' booths, and another Standard fee type to sell 20'x20' booths. Later, when enough registrations are received, you can assign specific booth locations to registrants.

If you are manually assigning booth numbers, we recommend that you add a few custom "Office Use" fields to your registration form to help track the assigned booth numbers.

Request preferred booth number(s):

To assist you later when you are assigning booth numbers to your Exhibitors, it can be helpful if you ask for the Exhibitor's booth preference(s) during registration.

We recommend asking exhibitors for their top 3 booth booth number picks, like so:

To do this:

  1. Open the Event Manager App > Registration section > Forms tab, and edit the registration form you used to register booth participants.

  2. In the Form Designer, go to the Fields tab.

  3. Click the +Fields tab and add a new Textbox field.

  4. Set the Short Field Id for the new Textbox field to something like "PreferredBooths" and set the Label to "Preferred Booth #'s". You can also set the Input Hint to something like "Please provide your top 3 booth locations. We will make best efforts to place you in your preferred booth locations".

  5. To display a floorplan, edit the new PreferredBooths field and set the Link field to the location of your floorplan.

    Need help creating a floorplan diagram for your event? Click here to read our recommendations.

    This must be a publicly accessible link on the Internet. We recommend keeping this file in a service like Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive and pasting a public share link to the file. This approach can help to keep the file current after making any changes to the file.

Track assigned booth numbers:

To track which booth number has been assigned to an exhibitor, we recommend adding some additional fields to your Exhibitor Registration form.

  1. Open the Event Manager App > Registration section > Forms tab, and edit the registration form you used to register booth participants.

  2. In the Form Designer, go to the Fields tab.

  3. Click the +Fields tab and add a new Textbox field.

  4. Configure the new Textbox field to be a hidden "Office Use" field that you can later use to record the assigned booth location to the registrant.

  5. In the Field Settings tab > GENERAL section, fill in the Short Field Name (Id), Label, and optional Input Hint.

  6. In the Field Settings tab > DISPLAY section, set the Field Visibility setting to "Never display field (hidden)".

  7. Save your form.

You have now added a hidden field that can be used to track assigned booth numbers.

To assign booth numbers to registrants:

  1. Open the Event Manager App > Registration section > Registrants tab, and edit the booth registration you wish to assign a booth number to.

  2. Go to the Registration tab and find the "Office Use" field you added (see above) to record the assigned booth number.

  3. Enter the assigned booth number for that registration.

  4. Click Save.

Viewing assigned booth numbers

A quick way to see all of the booth numbers that you have currently assigned is to use the registrant Worksheet view.

  1. Open the Event Manager App > Registration section > Worksheet tab

  2. Select the booth registrant from the dropdown list to view all registrants.

  3. Scroll over until you see the "Office Use" field you added to track the assigned booth number (for example "Assigned Booths").

Sharing booth assignments

Once booth assignments are finalized, use the Messages section to share assigned booth numbers with booth registrants (like Exhibitors & Vendors).

One of the best ways to share booth assignments is through a downloadable floor plan or exhibitors listing that includes the name of the booth owner and the assigned booth location/number. Most events create these files once they have finalized their booth assignments. These files can then be attached to a new Message and shared with specific registrant types.

To share booth assignments using a Message:

  1. Open the Event Manager App > Messages section > click +Add to create a new message.

  2. In the Recipients field, select the registrant types you want to share the message with (e.g. "Exhibitors"):

  3. Check the Publish checkbox if you wish to also post the message on your Event Portal (NOTE: it will only be visible to the selected Recipients).

  4. Fill in the Reply-to Email, Subject, Message Body fields.

  5. Save your changes.

  6. In the Attachments area, click the Attach File add a downloadable floorplan or booth assignment list to the message.

  7. Save your changes.

  8. Click the Send as Email button when you are ready to send a bulk email directly to all currently approved booth registrants.

Considerations for assigning booth space:

Assigning booth space can be complex and can be as much art as it is science. Many factors can go into your decision to assign a registrant to a specific booth space. Here are some useful things to consider when assigning booth spaces:

  • Sponsorship rights: You may wish to grant exhibitors who are sponsoring your event the right to pick their space first

  • Past exhibitor expectations: You may wish to give returning exhibitor from past events preference over new exhibitors

  • Proximity: Some exhibitors may not wish to be neighbors to a competitor.

  • Exhibitor popularity: If you suspect a certain booth will draw crowds, make sure they are in an open area (perhaps at the end of an isle). 

  • Special needs: Does the exhibitor have special needs (access to water, power, needs to fly drones inside, etc.)

  • Noise & Commotion: Is the exhibitor expected to make noise or cause a commotion? Will their neighbors be tolerant? Perhaps they'll have to run a generator, demonstrate a noisy product or service, or play live music? 

Conclusion

There's many ways to manage booth spaces. The common approaches we described here are not the only way to deal with the booth space management.

If you'd like to chat with an event expert about how to best set up and sell booths at your event, connect with us using the Chat button below.

Happy planning!

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