Home Instead is the world’s largest global home care network, supporting over 100,000 seniors. Its annual event, The Home Instead National Conference, takes place over two days at the Manchester Central Convention Complex. 

The event unites Home Instead’s national network to celebrate its commitment to care and review collective achievements from the past year. Welcoming 1,200 delegates, the event features 40 exhibition stands as part of its Partner Village area, along with plenary sessions, workshops, interactive zones, and even a cinema experience.

The conference team consists of three internal staff members who manage elements of the event alongside their day-to-day roles, with additional delivery support from event production company Top Banana.

Helen Jones, Communications Manager at Home Instead, explains how FFAIR’s exhibitor management platform helped the team transition from a frantic process to a proactive, organised approach in 2024.

“We’ve run the conference for over 13 years, and during this time, the exhibition element of our event has grown significantly. In 2023, responsibility for organising the exhibition became part of my role. It was a successful year, and we sold more stands than ever before. 

We were using spreadsheets to manage exhibitors and PDF documents to share information, which resulted in countless questions and hundreds of emails. It was manic! During the conference debrief, we recognised that this wasn’t a sustainable way to work, and we needed a better solution.

I attended International Confex and met with Adam Jones (CEO at FFAIR). He gave us a demo of the platform, and I quickly realised FFAIR was the answer to my prayers - I almost pulled his arm off! This was exactly what our team needed. 

The Tasks functionality expedited the process of getting exhibitors to complete everything within deadlines, while the online exhibitor manual became a fantastic repository for information. If an exhibitor had a question, we could send them a direct link to the relevant section in the online exhibitor manual.

The Shop saved us an enormous amount of time. Previously, we had to liaise between exhibitors and suppliers, helping exhibitors source what they needed for their stands. With the Shop, exhibitors could easily find and order exactly what they required without needing to contact our team.

The FFAIR Customer Success team was incredibly supportive. They not only onboarded our team but also took the time to engage and train our event agency, getting them up to speed quickly. Top Banana was blown away by the platform and excited to use it.

FFAIR sells itself in terms of effectiveness. The outstanding customer support throughout the process made it even better. Nothing was too much trouble. We really appreciated aspects of the onboarding process, such as the ability to jump on a call whenever needed, the recommendation documentation that helped us refine our Tasks setup, and the final checks and suggestions before going live with exhibitors. 

FFAIR solved countless problems and helped us become much more organised as an event team. But more than that, it transformed how we manage our exhibitors, enabling us to move from a reactive to a proactive approach. By freeing us from admin-heavy tasks, we could spend more quality one-on-one time with exhibitors. We used this new-found time to run exhibitor success calls, and support exhibitors with planning how they were going to dress their stands and what activations they would run.

As a result, our showcase was transformed from mostly white shell-scheme stands with pull-up banners, to a more visually engaging experience with graphics and activations, ultimately improving the visitor experience.

We received fantastic feedback from exhibitors, who were incredibly positive about their experience with FFAIR. Many of our exhibitors also regularly attend other events across the country so are well-versed in exhibiting at event and have raved about their pre-event experience. FFAIR played a key role in helping us create a truly positive event experience for our exhibitors. 

I love FFAIR’s user suggestions board. I believe it speaks volumes about FFAIR’s approach to feedback and makes users feel like we’re part of the development process and that our needs are considered in shaping the platform’s future.

It was an absolute pleasure to use FFAIR, and we’re already planning to expand our use of the platform next year, including support for other areas such as speaker management.

I rarely leave reviews, but this was such a positive experience that I felt compelled to share it.”

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