British Council Bulgaria held their annual Education UK exhibition in Sofia in October 2016.

The event, targeted at HE market, hosted representatives from 23 UK institutions and provided opportunities to engage with prospective students, visitors and partners.

We are delighted to report an increase in both the online pre-registrations (12%) and the actual attendees (4%) compared to figures from the 2015 exhibition. In the context of uncertainty following the result of the EU referendum, we strongly believe that this is a considerable success. Furthermore, there is an increase in the number of cities that registrants come from – in 2015 we had visitors from 17 regional centres in Bulgaria, whereas in 2016 we had visitors from 26 regional centres.

We managed to reach online audiences across the country through the live streaming (broadcasting online) of 16 presentations by UK exhibitors. These presentations also live beyond the exhibition and their viewership numbers increase further over time. Unfortunately this year the live broadcast of some of the presentations (those scheduled for the afternoon) was affected by the large cyber-attack in the US on Friday 21 October 2016 (which brought down sites like Twitter, PayPal, etc. and was largely reported in the media). This attack also disrupted the Livestream.com service we are subscribed to for streaming the presentations live. Although the global issue was beyond our control, we resolved it locally by recording the presentations offline and then uploaded them manually to the server so that they were available online for the start of the exhibition.

The presentations programme can be found on the British Council Bulgaria website http://www.britishcouncil.bg/en/study-uk/education-uk/programme.

We will maintain the recordings as online content for one year, so you can come back and revisit the number of views over time on http://livestream.com/BritishCouncilBulgaria/euk2016.

At British Council Bulgaria we highly appreciate your support and hope that we can continue to provide valuable marketing services in terms of both our exhibitions and also our range of other targeted activities during the year.

We hope to see you again at our next exhibition on 21 October 2017!