Archival record · exhibitor notice, 2015

Exhibiting at the conference, and the pause that followed

The exhibit hall was the centre of Mission Fest Toronto. Everything else on the programme — the plenary sessions, the seminars, the streams — brought an audience into a building where a hundred-odd mission organisations had a table.

How it worked

Exhibitors booked a numbered booth. The 2003/04 hall roster survives in full and shows the system: booths were listed individually with a status of booked or available, and the registered organisation's name against each. 17 of the organisations on the conference's later A-to-Z roster can be matched to a booth from that year.

Volunteers staffed exhibitor check-in, and the volunteer department list describes the job as helping exhibitors find and orient themselves at their booths through the busiest hours of set-up and move-out.

The 2015 notice

The last version of this page is not an invitation but an explanation. Responding to enquiries about the next conference, the organisation said it was taking a needed break to reflect and plan for a twentieth-anniversary conference in 2016, and that there would be no conference in 2015. It pointed exhibitors instead to MissionsPages.com, an online directory where a ministry could stay visible to the conference's audience at lower cost, and it noted a new mailing address.

The twentieth-anniversary conference does not appear in the published record. What followed was a transition — described in the organisation's own notice — and then regional events rather than the single large hall, ending with the 2018 west regional conference.

The organisations that exhibited are listed in the directory of mission organizations.

What exhibitors said it was worth

The conference published exhibitor comments alongside its own material, and they are the only place in the record where the value of a booth is described by the people who paid for one. They are unusually specific about mechanics. Linda Nagel, head of WEC's mobilization department, counted the result rather than the atmosphere: fifteen visitors wrote their names on the sheet for further information and six of those answered the follow-up letter, which she called the best response the organisation had seen in years.

John P. Brown, Canadian director of Africa Inland Mission, gave the argument the conference made about itself back to it in two halves. AIM participated, he wrote, because it was essential to show Canadians that mission organizations were working together — and also because it was useful: people whose first encounter with AIM was at the booth had gone on to work across Africa. Both halves matter. A conference that only produced goodwill between agencies would not have kept a hundred of them paying for tables for twenty years, and one that only produced leads would not have needed to put them in the same hall.

The pattern in those two accounts — a named list, a follow-up letter, a count of replies — is what exhibiting meant before the same function moved online. It also explains why the 2015 notice pointed exhibitors at a web directory as the substitute: not as a like-for-like replacement, but because a listing was the cheapest remaining way to be findable by the same audience once the hall was not being booked.

The exhibit hall as a structure

Around this page the conference kept a small cluster of others for exhibitors alone: separate guidance for returning and for new exhibitors, floor plans, an accessories page for what could be rented with a booth, and a year-specific exhibits page for at least 2011, 2012 and 2014. That structure is the shape of an operation that expected the same organisations back annually and needed a different conversation with the ones arriving for the first time.

The floor plans are the part that did not survive in usable form, which is a real loss: the 2003/04 booking roster gives numbers from 130 to 1045 in ten blocks, so the hall was laid out in aisles, but the plan that would turn those numbers back into a map is gone. What remains is the numbering itself, and the adjacencies it implies — a Bible college beside a relief agency beside a city mission, which is the encounter the whole exercise existed to arrange.