Woman: OK... well thank you very much everyone. First of all I’d like to introduce myself and my company. I’m Paula Shandling from Praxis Academic Recruitment Fairs and I’m here today to tell you a little about our operations in various parts of the world and the specialist services we offer to make our exhibitions well known for being cost and time effective - reaching your target audience with the minimum of effort on your part.

Now firstly I should explain that the main geographical area we serve is Central America. But, and, I understand this is the area of interest for most of the audience here today, we are currently expanding into South-East Asia.

Right, regarding our exhibition package, we believe we offer a very comprehensive deal to the prospective exhibitor. We have found over the years that clients prefer to have a self- contained package rather than spending time negotiating add-ons. And because of this we have been able to keep the cost to a minimum. And what that includes is, as you can see, the exhibition stand. Of course, you can’t get very far in an exhibition without one of those – and also full materials delivery. We’ll get everything to the venue for you safely. And a very popular recent addition to the package has been the local trade guide. This has proved very successful because it includes lots of specific information about local conditions - hours of work, past patterns of enrolment in situ, etcetera, etcetera.

Now, as well as the full package on site, as it were, we are well aware that one of the most wasteful and demotivating aspects of fairs from your point of view is the time spent dealing with casual enquirers. For this reason we have been developing over the past two years what we call a ‘filtering system’. By this we mean our set of strategies developed to virtually guarantee that enquirers at your stand are genuine potential customers i.e. mature individuals with the appropriate means, and all this means that you maximise quality contact with potential customers. Now, how our filtering system works is through our targeted advertising and what this essentially means in the case of academic recruitment is to run adverts in academic journals, which of course we research thoroughly to keep up to date, and secondly through our own website. A recent development has been the service we offer to put your business information onto our website a month in advance of the fair and retain on the site for six months.

Right now, there are other features of our fairs which we adapt to local conditions – what we call ‘context-sensitive’ features. They are, as you can see, suitable opening times that means you have access when needed and that can make a lot of difference to the number of people attending, plus our interpreter service, particularly useful for undergraduate enquirers wishing to take advantage of language support services in your institutions.

A few practical details now - you can get more information from the publicity leaflet which I distributed at the beginning of the talk. This will tell you about venues and about special services and finally about costs.