They may be small in size, but name badges are one of the most important elements of your event. Think security, networking and marketing.
Your Ticket In
At our events, without a name badge you don’t get past security. It is your entry ticket, and it’s worth a lot of money-as much as $2,000 at some conferences. Delegates may look at name badges as a nuisance, but it’s your stamp of approval for the security team.
Networking Tool
Name badges are a conversation starter. It never ceases to amaze us that organizers still use small badges and small fonts. If you can’t read a person’s name from 12 to 15 feet away, you’re making it hard for your delegate to network. We put the first name in extra-large type, followed by last name and company name in smaller type. Seeing a big first name on a badge makes it easy to say hello and use the person’s name as part of getting acquainted.
Marketing Tool
A lot of delegates take their badge home with them as a souvenir. We have stacks of them from events we’ve attended. You can think of badges as a little marketing piece that lasts well past the event. That’s why it’s important to have the event/company logo on them.
A word of caution: Watch out for crashers who think they can sneak past security with an outdated badge. To help catch would-be crashers, we make our badge designs radically different from year to year, changing the logo placement, font color and graphics.
Paper or Plastic?
We use paper sticky badges when we want a temporary entrance badge for a conference guest. These are customized with a preprinted graphic or accent color, and often include the name of the specific function. Stickies have a short shelf life.
For fully registered delegates, we use sturdy plastic holders (3-by-4-inch badges work best for us). The holders can also contain additional items such as tickets that the delegate can redeem for their conference welcome pack or a small pocket agenda of program details. As part of our green efforts, we typically recycle plastic badge holders.
Preprinted or Print-on-Demand?
We used to preprint all of our name badges and take them with us to the event. It was time-consuming beforehand, but time-saving at the event itself. For the last several years, however, we’ve used the printon-demand method. The benefits are that we know exactly who has checked in and when, and we can keep better track of who lost their badge.
Print-on-demand does take extra equipment and staff. For smaller events of perhaps a couple hundred people, the preprinted method may be the way to go for cost savings. But we feel that a print-on-demand process works better for larger events.
A Word or Two About Lanyards
We don’t really like them. Sure, they’re an opportunity to get more sponsor revenue by imprinting a company name, but our delegates don’t like wearing a competitor’s name around their necks. Plus, lanyards have a tendency to flip the badge around so they can’t be read or they slide under the delegate’s jacket so they can’t be seen by the security team. Crashers might like this, but our security team doesn’t.
The Future of Name Badges
We’re toying with the idea of adding delegate photos, scanning codes or security chips to our badges as an added security measure; the deciding factor is whether the benefit is worth the cost. We’re not sure the expense is worth the benefit, but we’re looking into this. As always, we’re thinking big about a small thing.
Jim Burba and Bob Hayes
Jim Burba and Bob Hayes are co-founders of Burba Hotel Network, a worldwide leader in developing and producing conferences for the hotel and tourism investment community. Since 2000, their events have attracted nearly 80,000 delegates in 22 countries.
