BOSS Attends The Southeast Texas Disability Career Fair
May 1st, 2008 is a pivital point in the BOSS program. Zoe and I were able to attend the Southeast Texas Disability Career fair at the Beaumont Civic Center. The event was a huge success for BOSS, and I am going to tell you the full story here in this post
To begin with, Zoe and I woke up at 4:30 in the morning and got ready to catch the bus at 6:30. The bus came on time and we were on our way to the Beaumont Civic Center. Now just to back up a bit, the reason why we had to get to the civic center so early was because everybody that had a booth at the career fair was able to attend a special breakfast. At this breakfast, we had a few guest speakers, but the presentations were very short.
After we had the breakfast, we went into the main area of the civic center and began setting up our booth. It was at that time that I had realized that we didn’t have an extension cord, and I had asked one of the civic center employees if we could have an extension cord to use. They managed to go and get one for us. So we proceeded to set up our booth.
We took out the 50 CD’s that we had with the presentation on them about our program, plus the business cards, flyers and index cards for the visitors to use to give us their contact info on.
The presentation Cd that we gave away was a complete information package about the Blind Online Success System. It contained interviews, our registration form, free screen readers and even some accessible games. However, the main focus was the information about the program that was on the discs.
That CD was a project that took me some time to put together, but it had to be done in order to properly represent our program. I must say that the CD project went very well and I came out with a great information product for our program that I can use at any time. The package wasn’t career fair speciffic. That means that I can use the CD for any promotion for our program, and I think that it will go over quite well.
I have to say, it was a great turnout! We couldn’t have done better than we already had. There was definitely a good response to our program, and we even had the Beaumont Enterprize newspaper come over to our booth to ask us questions. They took down some information,so now all we need to do, is to check tomorrow’s paper to see if they had printed something about our program there. Yes, I can honestly and faithfully say that our program is growing by leaps and bounds and the word is definitely getting out about it. I tell you, promoting the BOSS program is a lot of work, but it is also quite rewarding, especially when you start seeing the returns from your efforts. That’s when it really gets exciting.
Zoe honestly didn’t think that we would even have any real results, and a matter of fact, she said that it will probably be just a dog and pony show. Boy was she proven wrong! She was totally amazed at how successful this promotion became, and she was actually doing some speaking about the program too.
Zoe and I work together as a team on these kinds of things, and it just goes to show that when you work together, you can definitely accomplish a great deal, and that’s what we did. We promoted BOSS.
This is truly a great time for BOSS because we’re just upgrading to our new site, and our program is starting to grow. It is truly amazing to see that there’s really a market for our program out there, but perhaps the most exciting thing that Zoe and I had seen all day yesterday, was the reactions of people when we told them that our program was free. They were truly amazed that it didn’t cost anything. They couldn’t believe that we’re offering this at no cost to them.
Also, out of Thursday’s events, I actually got a speaking engagement out of the deal too. I am supposed to speak at a support group called Rise, which mainly consists of people with different disabilities. Some of these people are blind, while others may have other types of disabilities. However, I don’t think that Rise has any blind people at the moment, but the speaking engagement will be a great start in the right direction because even though those folks may not be able to join BOSS, they can at least learn how other people with visual impairments are able to run and manage their own online businesses.
Speaking at rise will also give those folks hope, which is vitally important to their daily living as independant individuals. I want to show them that no matter what comes their way, they can succeed at whatever it is that they want to succeed at. They just have to put their mind to it and make the decision to succeed and not to let frustrations, or other people get in their way of that.
It is events like the career fair that can really bring BOSS to the forefront. You see, events like this allow for us to expand, and also get the word out about our program, and that’s what Zoe and I had done on May 1, 2008.
