Mellow Yellows

Did you meet the 'Mellow Yellows'?

You may have if you attended the Christian Resources Exhibition at Telford at the end of February.
We took a stand there for three days to promote our work and, hopefully, win more supporters.
We decided to have a team identity, yellow shirts, and to decorate our tables with red cloths (very HHI).
We were, without doubt, with the exception of the fabulous puppet stand opposite us, the most colourful and vibrant stand there.
It was agreed that we would actively promote our 'Partnership in Mission', which in a nutshell is 'you support us and we'll support you'.
Hence we displayed a lot of Children's activities and resources, adult resources for Bible studies and investigation of the Christian faith, Christian cards and books, and a small selection of our crafts.
To illustrate our work in Zambia and India we had three display screens running which gave just the right level of 'flavour' of our work.
Having made an exploratory visit to CRE Esher in 2007 we decided that we needed some freebie to entice visitors to stop and talk with us.
The solution was a hand crafted teardrop ginger biscuit embossed with 'HHI'.
We made over 400 but ran out by lunchtime on day two; an emergency trip to the supermarket provided the chocolate fingers for the remainder.
Our other huge attraction was the hand made paper carrier bags, made by our Banyan Tree friends in India, which we used to hold the leaflets we distributed.
We ran out of these also, but unlike the biscuits we weren't able to whistle up any more.
We actually had people coming to us and asking "Are you the stall giving out the lovely bags?"
We welcomed well over 700 visitors to our stand judging by the biscuits we gave out, and over 300 of these allowed us to take their details for further contact.
This we have recently done and we're awaiting responses.
We met some lovely people, had some most interesting conversations, sold a good amount of crafts and books, and await the fruits of our efforts.