Tis the season to be jolly and we know how hard our MSL community is working to get students and staff into the festive spirit, even as students start to head for home. We’re especially delighted to see Christmas Fairs going ahead, giving a welcome opportunity for talented students to sell their products over the festive period. The MSL team is pleased as the proverbial Christmas punch that our creative clients are putting together attractive and engaging fairs using resources available in their MSL System. With Refreshers just around the corner, we hope some of these ideas will inspire you for your next fair.

If you’d like to have a chat with the SU teams who created these fairs, or have questions about using the resources mentioned here, please contact us.

Creating a Fair using news articles

https://www.upsu.com/christmasfair/

University of Plymouth Students’ Union (UPSU) launched its first Virtual Christmas Fair in 2020 and continues the tradition with all stalls representing businesses set up by the fantastic students and alumni from the University of Plymouth. The stalls are set up using news articles, with additional creative wizardry from the UPSU web development team, and stall registrations are requested through a log in to the UPSU website to ensure students and alumni are the focus of the online event. UPSU makes use of Trello to project manage the subsequent stall set up requirements such as brochure attachments and product links.

Creating a Fair using organisations

www.hwunion.com/christmas-fair

Heriot-Watt University Student’s Union also launched their first online Christmas Fair in 2020 during Covid restrictions to support the many students who set up arts and crafts side-hustles during lockdown, as well as to promote shopping locally. The HW team uses organisations to create each stall, setting them up as ‘Business’ types with their own distinct template and some Javascript to arrange product photos into a gallery.

Using a JSON feed to display the stalls on the Fair’s homepage gives more control over styling and pulled images from each business to create an attractive landing page. The use of additional custom properties allows for a filtered display of a wide variety of stall types.

As Jamie Nutter, Deputy CEO of the SU, explains “The Fair seems to be well received by everyone. Creating business type organisations has worked really well and we're looking to keep the set up in place for future years and give stall holders access to edit their details themselves.”