My name is Elisabeth Mörz, and I'm working at the Chamber of Labor in Vienna, the marketing department where I deal with events. We have a fair every year where we try to help teenagers with their decision about starting a job, making a traineeship, staying in school or making a final decree in a high school. We've been running this fair for the last 15 years but in 2020 due to pandemic, we could not organize it live and we had to do a digital fair. And this was the problem! How do you do that? It was the first time we were confronted with such a challenge. So we were looking for some partners to help us. And that's why we contacted DigitalSunray for helping us create a digital fair.
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We chose DigitalSunray because from the very beginning they already had a clear idea how we could do it and how we could manage it. is that, how should I say that? I'm not a professional for digital anything so naturally you have in your mind that the digital fair should function the same way as a physical fair, but it is not. What I really liked about DigitalSunray is that they have so much experience and they can tell you what works good and what doesn't work. I like that they say what you need in a straight way, all to the point.
DigitalSunray designed the digital city for us where pupils could visit different houses and schools, and see descriptions of different kinds of traineeships.
Strengths
We had very good cooperation and communication with DigitalSunray. When there was something missing, you can tell them straight ahead. I liked to work together with DigitalSunray a lot. I felt that they know what they do. They always got to the point and were straightforward. This helps a lot because I don't want a partner who tells you what you want to hear. I want a partner who says what is good or what is bad. I need somebody who can say what we need to achieve success.
They understood out focus group - students and pupils - and what they need. I'm not a teenager anymore, so I don't know what is considered state of the art for a 13 year old girl.
What I also liked a lot is that I had one person who I was talking to, Marko Göls, and not about 15 people, and having only one contact is very convenient.
Areas to Improve
We are planning already the next fair with DigitalSunray, therefore we have already discussed about the problems we had at the fair last year. We learned a lot together and it was a learning process on both sides. So I can't say there is something to be improved because we were working together with DigitalSunray all the time.
Recommendations to others
You can't compare real life to the digital world. It's so different! You need much more explanation and guidance in the digital area than you need when you walk into a real-life room. At a physical fair there are little stands where you just go and explore. In the digital world, you need guidance, where to go and what to look.
What I also learned is that everybody thinks that schools are prepared with computers. They are not. And they don't have the right browsers. That's why we had a lot of children accessing our fair on their mobile devices. That was a big learning. Aside from responsive design, you have to make sure the solution is very practical for mobiles. You need to reserve sufficient time to test it and run training sessions with your focus group in order to really try it. This is very important. And the app has to be tested by somebody totally new, who has no idea and is using it for the first time. Because as the author and developer, you become very narrow minded by the end and you simple don't see issues. Due to corona limitations, we tested out digital fair in a very small group but clearly it would have been better if we could have trained it within a larger focus group and reserved more time for this.
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