The NHS Confederation is the membership organisation that brings together, supports, and speaks for the entire healthcare system in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

It organises a year-long programme of meetings, conferences, and events—both virtual and in-person. Its largest event, NHS ConfedExpo, runs annually at Manchester Central, welcoming over 5,400 delegates.

NHS Confederation initially sought to partner with FFAIR to streamline their exhibitor experience and create a 'one-stop-shop' online exhibitor manual for their exhibiting companies. Now, three years on, the partnership is delivering in more ways than the team at NHS Confederation could have anticipated.

Nick Westerman, Head of Strategic Partner Events at NHS Confederation, shares his experience:

"Before partnering with FFAIR, we relied on our general service contract system. While it served its purpose, it meant that the experience changed every year for our exhibitors and, as it wasn’t a centralised platform, exhibitors still had to access suppliers in various ways. The majority of the manual was also still hosted on a document, making it a rather outdated and inefficient system. Our initial idea was to build our own platform; however, after some research, we realised that an existing platform on the market could meet our needs.

After a demo with Adam (Jones, FFAIR CEO), we knew it was the solution we were looking for.

The key for us is that it is frictionless. Once an exhibitor signs into FFAIR, they have access to everything they need. From an event organiser's perspective, it offers a much better customer service experience than having to send exhibitors to different resources, not to mention being less labour-intensive.

The ability to make changes to the exhibition manual on the fly is a significant advantage. It relieves the pressure and stress of version control when compared to hard copy manuals.

We're able to adjust our manual and task list for the different types of participating companies, i.e., between exhibitors and sponsors who are generally space-only and often require more access to food and beverage orders for drinks receptions. We set up specific tasks for sponsors to ensure we have all the information we need, avoiding any additional spreadsheets or manual ordering.

Queries are significantly down while sales are up across the board. Our exhibitors have fewer questions, and we’ve reduced any negative feedback around the exhibiting experience to almost zero. We're now able to generate reports on exhibitors' orders more effectively than in previous years.

The intuitive design of the platform, alongside the automation, is what makes our lives—and the lives of our exhibitors—so much easier. Everything is where it should be, making it incredibly easy to use for everyone involved.

This is the fourth year we have partnered with FFAIR for our annual conference. There’s no denying that we were nervous at the start, but we’ve been blown away by the support from Adam and the team in helping us launch FFAIR to our exhibitors."