How to Plan a Successful Enrollment Fair for the Adoption of a New Technology Solution

March 30, 2016

If you are just joining us, be sure to check out Part 1, “Why hosting an enrollment fair is crucial to the adoption of a new technology solution”. What goes into planning, executing, and ensuring a successful enrollment fair? There are a few key resources and processes that we need for this.

1. Location
2. Equipment
3. Volunteers
4. Schedule and Communication
5. Script, Elevator speech, and tracker

A location must be secured for the enrollment fair. Ideally this is a public area where you can interact freely with your end users. The tables and volunteers should be highly visible. You’ll need some equipment to make this all work. Obviously, you need tables to work from. Chairs for the volunteers to rest. Banners and signs for way finding. Most importantly you’ll need the proper devices or technology to demonstrate the solution. If the solution requires users to input their data to be enrolled then ensure that the equipment has this capability otherwise you’ll have issues! Volunteers have to drive this fair. Where do the volunteers come from? The organization itself! As this is a project, most likely, the project team members should volunteer and they should recruit others from their respective teams and departments to help. The executive sponsors of the project would be highly visible and should be encouraged to participate. You need to develop a schedule for the enrollment fairs that coincides with your go live or deployment schedule. The enrollment fair comes first, then a deployment, then a fair, then another deployment… This plan needs to be communicated clearly and often! Finally your volunteers need a process to follow. This process may be a simple script, an elevator speech for example. They will also need a way to track who comes to the enrollment fair. This is useful for gauging the impact of the fair and tracking how many people are educated about the technology solution. If you’ve made it this far you probably have two opinions:

• “This is a great idea and I agree that we should do this!”
• “I don’t think this applies to me, this sounds like a lot of work, the end users will adapt anyways.”

If you have the first opinion then congratulations – you get it! You understand the important of connecting with your end users. You understand how critical it is to align with your business and partner for results. If you have the second opinion… I’m sorry but your project may be doomed for failure. However if you do have this second opinion and would like to discuss it more then give me a call – I would be happy to talk about the reasons why this applies to your specific situation and why you need to do this to be successful.