It’s an exciting time to be at Softcat, a FTSE 250 company and one of the UK’s most successful technology solutions businesses. They’ve reached the £1billion pa revenue milestone, opened their first office outside the UK and picked up a series of industry awards, as well as being ranked at #5 in Glassdoor’s Best Places To Work Employees’ Choice Awards.

But, that said, with the lack of a recognisable consumer brand, they still find themselves struggling to attract the high number of graduates they need to maintain their phenomenal growth and continued success. We therefore wanted to make more of a statement for them at their Graduate Fairs and on their campus events, so devised an exhibition stand and interactive game that would help them to stand out from the crowd.

Using a series of striking images for the collateral, we devised a 3×3 pop-up stand and branded table. On its own, it would make a striking impression, but we wanted Softcat to be more memorable than that, so designed and built an interactive memory game that would feature on a large screen in the centre of their stand wall.

The game was one we’re all familiar with; a memory/matching pairs game played on an iPad stand and displayed on a big visual screen to show the game in action. A 30 second timer counts down as the player has to remember the position of an every growing number of matching images that would appear – and then disappear – on rotating tiles. Depending upon the number correctly remembered and clicked upon, and how quickly that was achieved, the player would rack up a points score.

Their points and position on the top 100 would be confirmed on the screen at the end of their game. And for added spice, a manual leaderboard akin to Top Gear’s was also there where the top 10 players were written to a magnetic strip and added to the board with a degree of fanfare.

At the end of the day, the winner for each location was notified and they were sent a Google Mini for their efforts!

The game appeared at 3 graduate fairs – UWE, Bournemouth and Leeds – and was undoubtedly a stand that generated some of the best interest at those events – from players as well as other employers! (Where space was limited at other Fairs, we simply designed and produced pop-up banner stands for use).

The Softcat teams were busy all day with a constant stream of players wishing to register and test themselves – there was also a regular contingent of people returning to see if they remained on the Top Gear leaderboard! If there was any down time at all, the screen played their stop-motion animation which again was very different to other organisations and caught the eye.

The game – which can be used independently of the stand if so required – and stand will be used at next year’s graduate fairs, and will also be rolled out at internal staff events, office open days, and local outreach activities.