Cookie Wiebe met this woman while hiking from Mussoorie to Thatyr, India, on the banks of the Algar River. Cookie Wiebe

Cookie Wiebe, a friend of ours, has an art show opening in Wichita at the Fiber Studio this Wednesday at 4:00. However, this isn’t an ordinary art exhibit. Dave and Cookie Wiebe were long-term service workers at the Woodstock School in India during the 1990s. Dave and Cookie returned to India a few years ago, but their trip was cut short when Cookie was diagnosed with cancer. During the trip, Cookie took 2,000-3,000 pictures per month, and since Cookie was diagnosed with cancer, she has had a dream of displaying these photos in an art gallery. Her art exhibit, “…The Eyes of a Stranger”, will now have 30 of these incredible photos on display. We were privileged to work with Dave and Cookie to make this dream a reality and are extremely thankful for all the additional people who helped by donating their time and money.

We strongly encourage everyone to check out the Fiber Studio this Wednesday, June 22 from 4:00 – 9:00 or Friday, June 24 from 6:00 – 10:00pm to see Cookie’s exhibit. To learn more about Cookie, visit her website here – http://charitableliving.net/.

While we still have a lot of work to do on the exhibit before it ships in just over a month, we’re excited about how fabrication is coming along and we think people will enjoy seeing how we design and fabricate these exhibits. We’re looking forward to meeting everyone on Monday and hope the day of activities will spark new ideas and creativity for everyone involved!

One thing we learned when giving this presentation is that it’s extremely difficult to provide an overview of everything involved with online advertising in only 45 minutes. Sure, we talked about keyword generation, tracking traffic in Google Analytics, tying online advertising into search engine optimization and important elements to consider when laying out designs, but we were only able to scratch the surface of what makes a successful online advertising campaign.

Even though we would have liked more time to talk, we still enjoyed sharing some of our expertise with the class. We hope the class had fun and learned something as well; we definitely enjoyed the challenge of effectively covering a broad range of online advertising options and techniques in one class period!

The conference was held in El Dorado this year, and our first day there included a tour of four museums and art galleries in the town. We were all impressed by the variety and quality of muesums in El Dorado, and thoroughly enjoyed the delicious food and entertainment at each stop. None of us expected that we would be going out for a spin in a WWII Willys Jeep when we woke up that morning!

As exhibitors, we were allowed to set up a booth in the civic center conference hall to feature our company. We decided to forgo the typical booth, and instead brought three examples of traveling museum exhibits we have developed with NEH on the Road, Mid-America Arts Alliance, and Kauffman Museum. After setting up sections of “Bison”, “Our Lives Our Stories”, and “K is for Kansas” we attended a couple of very interesting seminars and spent the rest of the afternoon and following day talking to old and new friends.

If you stopped by our booth to say hello but would have liked more time to talk with us, we would love to hear from you!

Our "booth" at KMA 2010

We’re really excited to attend some interesting seminars, make new connections, and get back in contact with old friends.  Hopefully we’ll see some of you at the conference; we would love it if you stopped by our booth to chat!

To learn more about the annual KMA conference or to sign up to attend, visit the KMA website here.

We were extremely pleased with the turnout (at least 100 people showed up), and the wide variety of people that came for the gathering.  While it would have been nice to see some more “older” young alum, the starting time of approximately 10:30 pm wasn’t very convenient for families with young children.

Feedback

All of us at FHD really enjoyed the gathering, but our own opinions really aren’t that interesting to us.  If you were at the gathering, we want to hear from you!  What did you like about the get-together?  What would you change in the future?  Do you think you deserve another chance to challenge someone in HyperOlympics or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the arcade?  Let us know what your thoughts are!

We were extremely pleased by the turnout and the great questions asked during the Q&A time.  One attendee asked us what the most difficult part of designing a traveling exhibit is.  After giving this some thought, we concluded that one the most difficult parts of designing and building traveling exhibits is developing an exhibit system that can fill a large venue, but still work in a small venue without making the exhibit seem crowded.  As we continue to build exhibits, we continue to find new ways to fill the space in a venue without overbuilding the exhibit.

Thanks to everyone who came out to our presentation, and to everyone who visited The Bison: American Icon during Fall Fest.  And if you haven’t seen the exhibit yet, you still have time!  Bison will be at Kaufman Museum on the Bethel College campus until October 24.

To learn more about The Bison: American Icon, visit the NEH on the Road website.

It was fascinating to hear perspectives from all levels of the exhibit development process, highlighting challenges faced along the way and innovative solutions to those challenges. It was also great to talk with people from the institutions who host the exhibits, and to brainstorm with them about possibilities for supplemental programming and promotion.

Thanks to those who attended. And for those who missed it, give us a call–we’d be glad to fill you in!

Update:

A few days ago we received feedback from our AASLH presentation. Everyone who rated our presentation gave us an overall rating of 10/10, and one person even said it was the best session they attended while they were there. Once again, thank you to everyone who came and visited us at the AASLH conference!

What Are You Talking About?

For those of you who have no idea what we’re talking about, we decided to have a little party.  We invited around 150 of our close friends to come check out our new building and see what we were working on.  We sent out the invites through nicely designed HTML emails and by creating a Facebook event:

HTML Email Invite

Facebook Event Invite

Tracking and Reports

We also decided to track the activity generated by the process, and then turn that into a very brief report that we could give to interested attendees, to show one aspect of the work we do.

Tracking Report