UFI Industry Partners Award 2025

Project background:

Client: First Sight Media (with NHS Confederation and LineUp Ninja)

Sector: Exhibitions, conferences, event technology, live content

Scope: Award strategy, messaging development, research, interviews and award entry drafting

The challenge

The UFI Industry Partners Award is open to exhibition partnerships worldwide and attracts entries from some of the largest and most established organisations in the global events industry.

For First Sight Media, working alongside NHS Confederation and LineUp Ninja, the challenge was twofold:

• To articulate the impact of a relatively compact, agile partnership on a global stage dominated by multinational organisations.
• To clearly evidence how collaboration, rather than scale or budget, was the defining factor behind innovation at NHS ConfedExpo 2024.

Vividink was engaged to define the narrative, distil the strongest evidence from all partners, and translate a complex, multi-supplier collaboration into a compelling, results‑driven award submission.

Our approach

Vividink acted as the independent thread across the partnership, ensuring the story was cohesive, credible and grounded in outcomes rather than hype.

Our role included:

• Defining the core messaging framework for the entry, focused on customer‑driven innovation and trust‑based collaboration.
• Researching the award criteria and benchmarking against previous UFI winners and finalists.
• Interviewing senior stakeholders at First Sight Media, NHS Confederation and LineUp Ninja to capture multiple perspectives without diluting the story.
• Structuring and drafting the award entry to balance creativity, operational delivery and commercial impact.

The emphasis throughout was on integrity: three partners working openly, with no hierarchy, to serve the organiser’s objectives and the delegate experience.

A different kind of partnership

What distinguished this entry was not just what was delivered, but how it was delivered.

NHS Confederation approached First Sight Media with clear objectives but without prescribing solutions, enabling genuine innovation. That freedom cascaded across the partnership, allowing LineUp Ninja’s technology and First Sight Media’s content expertise to integrate seamlessly.

“It’s rare that an organiser comes to a briefing with clear objectives but no preconceived solution. Nick gave us the creative freedom to propose ideas that genuinely moved the dial — and the results speak for themselves.”
Rich Belcher, First Sight Media

Together, the partners created a content ecosystem designed to work live, on‑demand and long after the event closed.

Innovation in action: content‑led, tech‑enabled

At the heart of the submission was a shared focus on improving the delegate experience through content and technology working as one:

• A purpose‑built Content Zone, including a Speakers Studio and Podcast Recording Studio, live‑streamed to more than 750 virtual attendees.
• A dedicated interview space produced over 60 high‑quality video assets, viewed more than 5,250 times post‑event.
• Real‑time digital signage and scheduling integration via LineUp Ninja, providing a single source of truth for over 5,600 in‑person delegates.

“This collaboration showed what’s possible when you align live production with real‑time data. Our system became the single source of truth, cutting through manual processes and improving the experience for everyone involved.”
Joe Atkinson, LineUp Ninja

Measurable results

A critical part of Vividink’s role was ensuring the entry clearly demonstrated commercial and operational impact:

• Attendance increased from 4,200 in 2023 to 5,500 in 2024, and over 7,000 in 2025.
• Turnover grew from £1.9m in 2023 to £2.1m in 2024, with £3.5m in 2025.
• Speaker demand surged, with more than 1,000 applications for just 103 session slots.

“Rich instilled so much confidence that we removed the creative shackles. The ideas were fresh, relevant and immediately valuable. It worked — so much so that we opened registration for 2025 two months earlier than usual, and we’re already tracking 20% growth.”
Nick Westerman, NHS Confederation

The outcome

First Sight Media was named a finalist in the 2025 UFI Industry Partners Awards in the category of Partnering in Customer‑Driven Innovation.

While the award ultimately went to Kuehne+Nagel — a global logistics organisation operating at a vastly different scale — being shortlisted as runner‑up underscored the strength of a partnership built on trust, creativity and measurable results.

For Vividink, this project exemplifies the value of clear messaging, rigorous research and disciplined storytelling — ensuring outstanding work stands confidently alongside global industry leaders.

How Vividink adds value

At Vividink, we don’t manufacture stories — we uncover them. Our role is to shape complex collaborations into credible narratives that stand up to international scrutiny and deliver results where it matters most.