This year, I (Cristina) and colleagues Carsten and David designed the booth that would represent OM on the conference floor amongst hundreds of other mission organization's booths. Edgar was in charge of the logistics of OM's presence at Urbana.
Here's the (almost) final product as it looked in our set-up zone at OM USA. Good thing we had an area with high ceilings! Oh, and the flags aren't part of it. :) They were just in the way.
And here's the process of making it! It was A LOT of hard work. And took lots of wonderful volunteers. At the end you can see the entire team surrounding it during our Thursday morning prayer time, praying for the conference & the many people our recruiters will meet.
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For those of you interested, I'll explain some of the process we went through to create this 18' tall environmental piece...The challenge: the price of booth space skyrocketed this year. Last time, OM had 4 10'x10' spaces to create a large area for recruiters to have conversations with the people they met. This year we could barely afford one 10'x10' space. We also had very little money to work with to create the actual booth.
The goal: Name recognition & Branding. We still wanted to have a big presence at Urbana, to stand out, and attract people to our booth.
The solution: We decided to go UP. While attending Catalyst (another huge conference in October), I realized an obvious fact: when you have thousands of people walking in gridlock on a conference floor, the only stuff you can see is at least 8' off the ground. Anything lower is completely blocked, and only useful to the first row of people standing right next to the booth.
Carsten dug out some old stage equipment that had been used on a concert tour. Recycling this equipment/framework he made 4 towers... 2 were 18' tall, and 2 were 10' tall.
I ordered canvas fabric in bulk (and on discount!) and with the help of Carsten's wife Michayla, and my own mother (literally, everyone and their mother had to pitch in on this one!!) we sewed a giant pillowcase/slipcover/screen that would suspend between the two tallest pillars.
David & a team of writers put together about 30 minutes worth of animated text to project onto the screen. The text, fun and conversational, served to inform our "audience" of the myriad of ways one can get involved in Missions with OM. David also set up a twitter feed to appear under the text. OM fields around the world tweeted in opportunities to serve in their country!
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