Experts consulted for this article:
Taylor Elliot
VP of Marketing and Customer Experience, Shepard
Sarah Cappuccitti
Senior Director of Strategy & Experience Design, Shepard
At Shepard, we spend a lot of time helping clients think through how to show up at events with creative activations — how to draw a crowd, create a moment, and build community around their brand. But it’s one thing to advise clients on creative strategy and yet another to put it into practice yourself.
So when we step onto a show floor as exhibitors, we try to practice what we preach. Here’s a look at what we’ve been doing at Expo! Expo!, PCMA, SandboxLive, and other events, and what we’ve learned along the way.
Our 120th anniversary activation at Expo! Expo! 2025: creating a moment within a moment
A few months ago at Expo! Expo!, we set off a confetti cannon in our booth.
The event floor was suddenly, gloriously, covered in color. People stopped, stared, and came over to see what was happening.
The confetti was the exclamation point on a larger brand awareness campaign we’d built around our 120th anniversary as a company, starting with a social media push and culminating in the in-person celebration at our booth.
The morning before the big moment, we built excitement by offering the first 120 visitors to our booth a small donation to a charity of their choice. It gave people a reason to stop by and chat, which in turn gave us the opportunity to share a little about our company history, and invite them to join us again at 1:20 p.m. for our anniversary celebration.
At the designated time, we popped the confetti. The effect rippled outward across the show floor in a way that no banner or digital display or marketing collateral could match. It was unexpected. It was a little bit of a mess. And it worked. We’d created a moment within a moment that could only have happened then and there, on the packed event floor, with all of our industry peers in attendance co-creating the sense of occasion.
“You really see the impact when you bring that community together,” says Taylor Elliot, our VP of Marketing and Customer Experience and one of the creative minds behind the activation.
She adds, “The best booth moments aren’t just about drawing a crowd in the room. They’re about creating something worth sharing — something that keeps the conversation going after the show has packed up and gone home.”
The photography and video we captured during the activation gave us content to share on social media, extending the moment beyond the event itself and sharing the enthusiasm (and maybe a little FOMO) with colleagues who weren’t in attendance.
The festive feeling continued that evening at The Blue Party, our annual invite-only gathering for customers, prospects, and partners. It’s become something of an industry tradition. This year we had a DJ, a live saxophonist, and a photo booth, giving everyone a chance to connect in a way the show floor doesn’t always allow.
Play, purpose, and giving back: building community through giving
The 120th anniversary activation reflects an approach we’ve been developing across multiple events and over several years.
At a previous Expo! Expo!, our booth featured a gamified activation we called “Play It Forward.” We set up a basketball hoop like one you might find at a county fair. For each hoop attendees sank, we made a donation to a charity of their choice. The idea was a hit.
Gamification, when it’s rooted in a solid concept and well-executed, creates dwell time and sparks conversation. In this case it drew on the spirit of friendly competition, with folks competing to rack up the most donations.
Giving back has become a signature of how we show up at PCMA’s Convening Leaders. At this year’s event in Philadelphia we sponsored the PCMA Foundation’s “Do Good, Feel Good” activation, where attendees packed bags in support of the American Cancer Society and Cradles to Crayons.
In previous years, we partnered with Fill it Forward to create a reusable bottle station with a consciousness-raising component. Attendees picked up a co-branded bottle, scanned a QR code each time they refilled it, and triggered a donation to a water infrastructure improvement project with every scan. The concept got people thinking about sustainability in a concrete way. That’s the kind of thing that stays with people.
The thread running through all of these is the same: give people something to do together and a common cause, not just something to look at or take in. The more participatory the activation, the more memorable it becomes.
Podcast studios: on-site content generation to fuel year-round engagement
Every couple of years, we host SandboxLive — our client appreciation and community event, which brings together our show organizer clients as well as event industry peers looking to learn and compare notes on emerging practices in the field. It’s one of the few occasions when all of our thought leaders are in the same room, and that made it an irresistible opportunity to test another idea: the on-site podcast content studio.
We built our branded podcast booth from very simple materials, using our efficient and sustainable beMatrix system. The result was a sleek, polished look that we could build and dismantle easily without breaking the bank.
There’s something about a live recording that lends the whole thing a sense of occasion, and gives the speakers a little cachet in the process. The experts who sat down to talk shop in our podcast booth weren’t just churning out content for its own sake: they were capturing something specific to the energy and knowledge transfer happening at the event. Shared with the world afterward, the podcast keeps the conversation going long after the event has ended. It also does quiet work throughout the year, building an audience that wasn’t in the room but might be next time.
We’ve since deployed this idea at ServiceTitan’s Pantheon and at events for the Society of Women Engineers WE24, among others.
The Inspiration Playbook: giving clients a starting point to spark ideas
We often hear from clients that they know they want their event or booth presence to feel more engaging, more participatory, more memorable. They have a group of people with common interests and a desire to connect,; they just don’t always know how to facilitate that.
That’s what prompted us to develop our Inspiration Playbook. Now in its rebooted 2026 edition, it’s a living collection of activation and experiential design concepts — scalable, budget-conscious, and organized to help organizers and exhibitors find event-tested ideas they can put into practice.
As Sarah Cappuccitti, our Senior Director of Strategy and Experience Design explains: “This version of the Inspiration Playbook is about finding the balance between sparking inspiration and giving customers the context they need to craft their own curated engagements. Our goal was to create something that fuels creativity, but also feels practical, approachable, and achievable.”
The concepts in the Playbook reflect the same philosophy behind everything described above: the best activations are rooted in purpose, invite participation, and create moments worth sharing.
Event organizers are in the community-building business
At Shepard, we’re in the business of facilitating connections between people through the power of live events, whether that’s within associations, within corporate cultures, or within the events industry itself. And in an era when many people work in hybrid or remote capacities and rarely see one another in person, that work matters more than ever.
The best activations share a few things in common: they’re rooted in purpose, they invite participation, and they give people a feeling of belonging to something. That’s true whether we’re building for ourselves or for clients.
So whether you’re an exhibitor trying to drive booth traffic or an organizer looking for fresh ways to engage your community, the question is the same: what moment are you creating, and what will it mean to the people who experience it?
Register to unlock the Inspiration Playbook!
