Who am I
talking to?

And the problem is changing fast. For two thousand years the fix was a person or an object: a servant’s whisper, a seating chart, a sticker. Now it is becoming a camera. Registration platforms already check guests in by face, and a few conferences have been fined or challenged over it. Smart glasses that could name a stranger have been reported in development, and organizers are banning them from their floors. The old question was how to help a guest remember a name. The new one is who is allowed to read a face. Reported Section 7 sets out what is known and what is not.

1  The stakesForgetting a name is not a small thing

You are mid-handshake. The face is familiar, the smile is warm, and the name is simply not there. Whatever the other person says next, part of you is not listening. You are searching.

That search has a cost, and it is the subject of this paper. Call it mental load.

Picture a desk. A clear desk lets you work on one thing. A cluttered desk makes you move papers around before you can start. The panic of retrieving a name is the pile of papers. The guest is technically standing in front of you, but their attention is on the pile.

Two things make the moment sting more than it should. The first is what it says to the other person. Research by Peter Ray, Sarah Gomillion and colleagues (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2019) found that being forgotten signals to people that they matter less to you. Excuses softened the blow but did not remove it. The same studies found little lasting effect on how people felt about themselves, so the sting is real but short.

The second is what it says to you. A name is the most personal label a person owns. A 2020 study by Hargis and colleagues found that names are an exception to the usual pattern in which people rate their own memory as better than average. Names seem to be the one place where people do not flatter themselves, and it is the place where a lapse costs the most. Researchers even have a word for the difficulty, alexinomia, though the word has not caught on outside the literature.

That hidden, two-sided anxiety is what an event organizer inherits the moment guests walk in. The organizer’s real job is to lower the guest’s mental load, so that their attention goes to the conversation instead of the panic. The name tag is the oldest tool for that job. It has been failing at it, quietly, for a long time.

2  Why it happensThe blank is usually not a failure of memory

Most of the time you did not forget the name. You never stored it. Two well-documented effects explain why.

The Baker/baker paradox

Show people a face and tell half of them “this man is a baker,” and tell the other half “this man’s surname is Baker.” Days later, more people remember the occupation than the surname, even though it is the identical word. The study that produced the effect came from McWeeny, Young, Hay and Ellis (British Journal of Psychology, 1987). Gillian Cohen named and popularized it in 1990.

The usual explanation is that a profession connects to things you already know: bread, ovens, early mornings. A name is an arbitrary label with one route in, so when that single route fails, nothing else leads you there. A caution: this is the best-known explanation, not settled law, and at least one replication attempt in another language did not reproduce the effect.

The next-in-line effect

Psychologist Malcolm Brenner described it in 1973: people forget what was said by the person just before their own turn, because they are busy preparing what they will say. In a receiving line, at a registration desk or in a circle of introductions, you are always the next in line. You are rehearsing your own name while the other person gives theirs. The name goes by unrecorded.

Inference Put together, these two effects suggest the fix is not to try harder. It is to give the name more routes in and to take pressure off the moment it arrives. Everything later in this paper is built on that idea.

3  The history of the fixHumans have been outsourcing this for two thousand years

1. About 500 BCThe oldest memory story we have is about a banquet. In the legend, the poet Simonides leaves a feast just before the roof collapses and identifies the crushed guests by where they were sitting. The tale is the traditional origin of the memory palace technique. Legend Frances Yates traced the lineage of these methods in The Art of Memory (1966).
2. Ancient RomePoliticians employed a slave called a nomenclator, from the Latin for “to call by name.” The nomenclator stood at the elbow of the master and whispered the name of each citizen approaching. Real The word survives in English dictionaries.
3. 1936Dale Carnegie, in How to Win Friends and Influence People, credits Jim Farley, a political organizer, with being able to call some fifty thousand people by name. Farley’s method was to ask a person’s name, spelling and background, and fix the face in mind. It is a technique, not a talent.
4. The 1920sOne convention-badge history reports that badges did not show attendees’ names until the 1920s. Single source Fraternal orders and conventions used badges to show membership, not to introduce strangers.
5. 1947 and 1953Science fiction conventions, per the fan encyclopedia Fancyclopedia, were early adopters of attendee name badges, at Philcon in 1947 and Coroncon in 1953.
6. 1959The adhesive “Hello My Name Is” sticker, credited to C-Line Products. For the first time the nomenclator is a pad of paper that costs a few cents.
7. TodayThe White House receiving line. Reporting and accounts of the practice describe an aide who stands near the president and quietly supplies the name of each approaching guest. The nomenclator never left. He changed his title.

Notice the pattern. Every fix is a way of moving the name from the guest’s head to somewhere else: a servant’s whisper, a banquet-hall seating chart, a sticker. The name tag is the democratic version of the nomenclator. Everyone gets one.

4  What went wrong with the tagThe fix created its own mental load

If the name tag worked, this paper would not exist. The name tag was built to answer one question, who am I talking to, and it answers it badly because most tags are designed for the person who prints them, not for the person who has to read them.

Top complaints in the same survey: long lines, misspellings, small type.

The type is too small, so guests stare at chests

To read a name set in small type you have to look at someone’s chest, and they can see you doing it. David Adler, the author of this paper, thought up G.I.A.N.T.T., the Group for Increased Average Name Tag Type, after realizing he had to carry reading glasses to social events to figure out who was who. The group called for names never smaller than 24 points, about three-eighths of an inch, and took the idea to professional organizations as its “24-Point Plus Challenge.” The Washington Post’s Style section covered the campaign in 2003. The clipping we have is the jump page, headed “Don’t You Wish Name Tags Were This Big?” Real In it, Adler said: “It’s one of these things that you don’t realize people care about.”

The Post reported that Adler had posted a name tag survey on the BizBash website in April and received 900 responses in 12 hours, with more than half saying small type was a problem, and that a petition for bigger type had gathered 400 names. Adler argued that the problem is larger than it looks because 75 million baby boomers have reached or are reaching what the Post called their bifocal birthdays. That last figure is his claim in the story, not our own finding. Hank Trisler, a San Jose sales trainer, offered a simpler test in the same story: if you can’t see a name past the second row of a sales seminar, “it’s too doggone little.” He wants the first name at least an inch high.

The lanyard, the sleeve and the guilt

Next came the lanyard. Worn too long, it hangs at the waist, which is worse than the chest. Then came the plastic sleeve, which turned the badge into landfill by evening and made planners feel guilty about it. Add the flipping problem, where the name faces the wrong way, and the badge becomes one more thing to manage.

The resistance

Some planners and older-guard hosts dislike the name tag on principle. It interrupts the table, they say, the way a plastic container interrupts a carefully styled tablescape. Black-tie crowds have a long tradition of refusing them altogether. Industry observation These are the author’s observations from years of covering events, not survey findings. They are real objections and a good design has to answer them.

The meeting designer Adrian Segar, quoted in BizBash’s “A Case Against Name Tags,” calls the badge an aide-mémoire: a prompt for memory, and nothing more.

5  The commerce sideThe badge is also a sales tool, and guests know it

“Who am I talking to?” has a second reading, and it belongs to the seller. The person behind a booth, or the sponsor working a reception, is not only trying to recall a name. In a glance, they are trying to decide whether you are worth their next ten minutes. That is prospecting, and the badge was recruited for it long ago. It is not a subtle use.

The printed face of the badge carries the title and company, and often a color or ribbon that sorts attendees into buyer, exhibitor, press or student. Industry practice The cost to legibility was visible in 2003. The Post described a lanyard badge at the new Washington Convention Center whose full-name type might have met the 24-point minimum, but whose red and blue stripes, “member” ribbons and insignia cluttered it. Behind the printed card sits a barcode or QR code. An exhibitor scans it with a lead retrieval device, which pulls the attendee’s registration record from the event’s database. Wikipedia’s entry on lead retrieval notes that exhibitors typically receive a predefined set of registration fields and cannot choose which ones.

What guests do about it

Guests notice they are being sized up, and some respond by hiding. A lead-capture vendor, Integrate, reports that attendees who want to avoid follow-up email register with a throwaway address, mistype their details or leave fields blank, and says the data that comes back from badge scans is “full of holes.” Vendor view The company sells an alternative to scanning, and its article cites no statistics, only its own conversations. Anecdotally, attendees also turn their badges around, tuck them away or avoid booths altogether. Anecdote, not research We could not find a study of badge flipping, and we would like to see one.

Same face, two badges

The clearest illustration we have comes from the show floor of IMEX America in Las Vegas. Lilly, who is 19 and the daughter of event industry expert Dahlia El Gazzar, attended as an official student of the industry and ran an experiment on herself. Wearing an exhibitor badge, she found that people did not stop to talk to her. Wearing a hosted buyer badge, the kind given to invited buyers whose attendance the organizer supports, she was treated, in the words of the account we were given, like gold.

Lilly also did the thing the badge business rarely does: she asked the people who build it. She sat down with the team from RainFocus, a registration and event technology company, on the show floor to learn how their platform handles onsite registration and data collection, and she looked at how the industry presents itself to exhibitors, hosted buyers and the young professionals about to join them.

If the badge swap happened as described, it is a tidy piece of evidence for the argument of this section. The face, the conversation and the person were identical. Only the strip of plastic changed, and with it the first two seconds of every encounter. Inference The badge was read as a price tag, and the exhibitor badge said “seller” before she opened her mouth. The cost runs both ways: the person in the exhibitor badge carries extra mental load of her own, working to be heard through a label that tells people to move along.

Who agreed to what

The consent question is unsettled. The registration company eventPower says that handing your badge over to be scanned counts as consent to be contacted, comparing it to handing over a business card, and notes that this is its own interpretation and not a legal opinion. Critics in the GDPR era argue that consent must be an opt-in, and that exhibitors cannot tell which scanned attendees actually opted in. Contested Rules differ by country and by event, so treat this paper as framing, not legal advice.

Inference When guests feel qualified before they are greeted, they take on a new piece of mental load: managing how exposed they are. Attention that could go to the conversation goes to the lanyard, and the booth loses the very person it hoped to meet. The commerce case and the human case point the same way. A prospect who feels safe stays longer than one who feels scanned. We have no data on that, but the logic is the same logic as the rest of this paper.

The fix is to separate the two jobs. The front of the badge does the human job: the first name big, readable and face-first. The code on the back does the commercial job, and only with a yes from the guest. Section 9 sets out how.

6  The design turnDesign the badge for four moments, not one

The name tag is not one object. It is a four-step experience, and each step can add or remove mental load.

Good, bad and next

Here is the same fictional guest on a badge that fights her, a badge that helps her, three badges that may come next, and the step beyond the badge: glasses. All names and companies are invented samples, not real attendees.

A menu, not a sticker

The adhesive label is one option among several, and for most events it is the weakest. Each way of identifying a guest trades cost, readability and keepsake value differently. Inference These trade-offs are our reasoning from how each format works, not test results.

• The sticker. Cheapest, and fine for a one-night mixer. It cannot hold a code, it is not a keepsake, and it ends up on a lapel or the floor.
• The lanyard badge. The workhorse. It carries the name, the scan code and sometimes the program. The risks are the length of the strap and the badge that flips to its blank side.
• The wristband. Common at festivals and venue entries. It is hands-free and hard to lose, but the type is too small to read in conversation, so it identifies access, not people.
• The pin, charm or clip. A small object that sits at shoulder height and becomes a keepsake. It suits events that want to feel considered.
• The smart badge. A tag with a chip so two guests can exchange details by tapping. It saves the awkward business card and raises the consent questions in section 5.
• The glasses. No object at all: a camera and an assistant that name the person in front of you. It is the biggest change on this list and the most contested, so it has its own section, number 7.
• The number or color. Race bibs and table colors are codes for groups and systems. They are quick and anonymous, and they work for machines and crowds, not for conversation.

Receive

The line at registration is the first mental load of the day. The Tassels and Tastemakers event in 2016, as covered by BizBash, replaced the desk with a wall display so guests found their own badge. The Summer Brand Camp of 2015 handed out beaded badges as a gift, so the receiving moment was a pleasure, not a queue.

Read

Legibility is the whole point. Engage in 2012 gave guests crystal charms. The design caught the eye, though it is worth asking of any such piece the one question that matters: can a stranger read the first name from a conversational distance? Beauty that cannot be read has solved the wrong problem.

Wear

Funconf made oak badges. PC/Nametag has promoted matching lanyards so the strap and the card agree. The best badge in the world hangs in the wrong place if the lanyard is too long.

Keep

Some badges double as the program, a booklet worn around the neck, so there is one object to manage instead of two. Kleertech markets biodegradable sleeves. Vendor claim The lesson is that a badge people want to keep is a badge people do not resent wearing.

Examples above are drawn from BizBash coverage between 2012 and 2018. Confirm current vendors and events before quoting them as present-day.

7  The new frontierFaces, glasses and the registration desk

Every fix in this paper moves the name out of the guest’s head. The next one moves it onto the face itself, with no label at all. The question for organizers is who gets to read a face, and the answer is being decided now, at registration, mostly without anyone saying so.

The registration desk already collects faces

The two largest registration platforms sell facial check-in. Vendor claim Wicket’s facial authentication is built into both Cvent and RainFocus. The guest opts in through a link or an on-site QR code and uploads a selfie. At the event they show their face to check in, collect a printed badge or enter a session. Wicket claims check-in is three times faster, and says it has been used at Salesforce’s Dreamforce, with more than 23,000 people in 2025. It names Nvidia, Workday, Zscaler and Autodesk among RainFocus clients using it.

The pitch is speed and security, and it is opt-in. The eShow registration company announced a similar “Express Entry” with Wicket in March 2026, keeping barcode scanning as the fallback and saying no biometric data is processed without explicit consent. Zenus, an earlier entrant, describes timestamped consent records and deletion of biometric data seven days after the event. The pages we read do not say how long Wicket keeps data. They link to privacy pages we could not read. None of this is independent evidence, and the Zenus review we found is a 2019 paid placement.

Regulators have ruled twice

• Mobile World Congress. In 2023 Spain’s data protection agency fined the organizer GSMA €200,000 over a facial-recognition entry system at the 2021 edition, which 7,585 of 17,462 in-person attendees used. The finding was that its privacy impact assessment was “merely nominal.” The ruling did not decide whether the legal basis for collecting the faces was valid.
• IFSEC. In 2018 the UK data regulator rejected a complaint about exhibitors scanning attendees’ faces without asking, holding that each exhibitor is responsible for consent, not the organizer. That matters for any booth that points a camera at the aisle.

Then the glasses arrive

The registration desk is where a guest first hands over a face. Glasses are where that face could be used by someone else. Here is what is known about each.

• Meta has reportedly planned it. Reported In February 2026 the New York Times reported, as summarized by TechCrunch, that Meta was working on a facial recognition feature for its glasses, internally called “Name Tag,” that would let wearers identify people and get information about them through its AI assistant. An internal memo acknowledged “safety and privacy risks.” Kaspersky’s July 2026 account, citing Wired, says the feature was never released to users, that code for it appeared in Meta’s app and was then largely removed, and that a Meta spokesperson said no such feature exists. The reports describe two versions, one limited to people in the wearer’s contacts and one reaching anyone with a public profile. Treat it as a plan that is neither confirmed nor shipped.
• Students have already shown the trick. Reported In October 2024 two Harvard students, as 404 Media reported, paired commercial Ray-Ban glasses with the PimEyes face search service and other tools to go “from face to name,” then on to a home address, a phone number and family members, in some tests on unsuspecting people. They said the aim was to raise awareness, and they did not release their code.

The case for. The goal of this paper is to lower the guest’s mental load, and glasses would lower it more than any badge. No type size, no strap length, no squinting at a lapel, and no blank at the moment of the introduction. It is the nomenclator again, now in the wearer’s ear. The same reporting says Meta first considered debuting the feature at a conference for people who are visually impaired, which points to the strongest case: help for people who cannot read a tag at all.

The case against. A name tag is a statement. The wearer decides what it says: a name, a company, a topic. Glasses that recognize faces are a search. They show what a system knows about you, which can be far more than you chose to say. The Harvard demonstration was exactly that gap. Inference Three further problems follow from how the technology would work, and are our reasoning, not test results.

• Not everyone is findable, and matches can be wrong. A system built on profiles knows people with profiles. It can miss the guest who is not online and can misname the one who looks like someone else.
• It skips the part that signals care. Research on being forgotten suggests a remembered name tells a person they mattered. A machine that supplies the name saves effort, but it does not show that the other person tried.
• It splits the room. Some guests would carry a quiet advantage and others would not know they were being looked up.

Our view. Opinion The glasses will not replace the name tag. They will make it more important, because the tag becomes the guest’s yes. The version worth building reads what the guest chose to broadcast, much like the tap-to-share badge in the graphic. The version to refuse identifies a face the person never offered.

The tag asks a person what they want to be called. The glasses answer a different question: who the system says they are. At a gathering, that difference is the whole design problem.

Organizers are already drawing the line

The guest’s own camera is a separate fight, and organizers are choosing sides. According to Skift Meetings (August 2026), DEF CON 34 barred recording-capable smart glasses, with no exception for prescription lenses, and the promoter of UK Comic Con banned recording devices after celebrities worried about secret filming. WorldGaming, which runs ICE and iGB Affiliate Barcelona, announced a similar ban in September 2026, citing exhibitor intellectual property. Skift also reports planners adding photo and video consent to registration forms and contract language that bans glasses from sessions and the show floor. Meta’s stated position, as reported, is that the responsibility lies with individual wearers.

Where the two gates meet

A guest now faces two separate yeses. One is the organizer’s camera at check-in. The other is every other attendee’s glasses on the show floor. Almost nobody is asking them as a single question: may my face be identified, by whom, and for what? Inference We found no event-technology vendor, including Cvent, RainFocus, Swapcard or Bizzabo, publicly planning to use glasses to identify attendees to one another. This is our reading of a gap, not a report of a plan.

• Put one consent question on the registration form. Ask separately whether the guest agrees to facial check-in and whether other attendees’ devices may identify them. Default both to no. Proposal
• Write a camera-glasses policy into the invitation. Treat glasses like photography, and say what is allowed in sessions, on the floor and at receptions.
• Hold exhibitors to the same rule. Under the IFSEC ruling, consent is the exhibitor’s job. The organizer can still require it in the exhibitor manual.
• Give the badge an opt-out mark. A “do not identify” symbol lets a guest decline without a conversation.

8  What happens when a whole city wears oneTwo experiments and a civic question

The writer and speaker Scott Ginsberg ran the longest experiment on record. According to the Washington Post’s 2003 story, he was 23, from Portland, Oregon, and as of July 1 would have worn one for 972 consecutive days. His tag measured 2½ by 3½ inches with “Scott” filling the whole space, so legible that people shouted “Hi, Scott” from passing cars, and people in stores assumed he worked there. His verdict: “It’s helpful in starting conversations.” The costs were real too. By his own count, sixteen people had tried to rip the tag off and seven had tried to beat him up. Real, as reported These are his own figures, quoted by the Post, and not verified by us. He also self-published a book that year, HELLO, My Name Is Scott: Wearing Nametags for a Friendlier Society, and discussed the experiment on CNN in 2003. It is a personal experiment, not a controlled study. There is also an annual Nametag Day in New York City each June 1st.

The closest scientific neighbor is the work of Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder, who ran nine experiments with commuters and found that people expected talking to a stranger to be unpleasant and found it was not. That study is about conversation, not name tags. Adjacent, not direct It is included because it points the same direction as Ginsberg’s experiment: the barrier to connecting may be lower than we think.

A civic question: could a name tag help with loneliness?

The experiments above point at something bigger than event design. In 2023 the U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, issued an advisory on loneliness and isolation. It reports that about half of U.S. adults experience loneliness and says that lacking social connection raises the risk of premature death about as much as smoking up to fifteen cigarettes a day. It also notes that brief, casual exchanges, such as a few words at a coffee shop or a post office, can build trust between strangers. If a name tag makes that first exchange easier, then it is a civic tool, not only an event accessory.

There is a trail of evidence pointing that way, none of it conclusive. Gillian Sandstrom and Elizabeth Dunn (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2014) found that on days when students interacted with more classmates than usual, they reported more happiness and a stronger sense of belonging, and that weak ties, or acquaintances, were linked to well-being on their own. Renee Zahnow and Jonathan Corcoran (Urban Studies, 2025) surveyed 278 residents of Brisbane and found that “familiar strangers,” people you recognize but never speak to, were associated with a sense of belonging. The Epley and Schroeder commuter experiments, mentioned earlier, found that people expected conversation with a stranger to be worse than it was.

Two studies come closer to the badge itself. A 2026 paper in the Journal of Happiness Studies by Dorothy Yen and colleagues tested a “Happy to Chat” badge, a message badge rather than a name tag, on 1,738 adults in England. Shown a photo of a stranger, participants rated the person wearing the badge as friendlier, more trustworthy and more interesting to talk to than the same person without one. The effects were small, the images were AI-generated, the scenario was hypothetical, and the badge did not significantly change people’s stated intention to chat. And in health care, Kate Granger, a doctor treated for terminal cancer, started the #hellomynameis campaign in the NHS after noticing how many staff never introduced themselves. The BMJ reported that more than 400,000 NHS staff had signed up by 2015. The campaign’s claims of better care are anecdotal, with no measured effect on the page we read.

Proposal A field trial would not be hard to run. Recruit volunteers in a neighborhood, a transit line or a coworking building. Give one group first-name tags, a second group a “Happy to Chat” badge, and a third nothing. Count conversations, and measure loneliness and belonging with standard scales at the start and after eight weeks. Gatherings themselves are a ready-made laboratory, because events already hand out badges and already have a captive group of strangers.

There are honest reasons for caution. A name on a stranger raises privacy and safety concerns, particularly for women, older people and anyone with a reason to avoid being found. Any civic tag should be opt-in, and a first name may be enough there. An event badge is a different case and should carry the full name. Not everyone wants to be approached, and the hosted-buyer story in section 5 shows that a label can rank people as easily as it can connect them. Inference The people who would benefit most from being approached may be the least likely to volunteer to wear a badge. That is a conundrum for any real trial.

Our view, labeled as opinion: this is plausible, cheap to test and not yet tested. It deserves a study.

A sidebar: the name tag people

When you see a crowd in name tags outside a conference, in a hotel lobby or on a train, what do you think? Is it a negative or a positive? The author calls them the name tag people, and the reaction is worth noticing in yourself. Observation, not research We do not know of a study on it, and we would like to see one.

9  TechniquesA field kit that works

The research above points to three levers: attend to the name when it arrives, give it more than one route into memory, and make the first thirty seconds easy. Here is how to use each lever, first as a guest and then as an organizer.

If you are the guest

1. Decide your greeting before you arrive. This takes care of the next-in-line effect. If your own part is rehearsed, your attention is free for theirs.
2. Look at the face first, then read the tag. Pair the two on purpose so the name attaches to the face and not to the chest.
3. Say it back at once. “Maria, good to meet you.” Hearing yourself say it is a second route in.
4. Use it again within a minute. Repeating the name in conversation spaces out the retrieval, which is the way memory is strengthened.
5. Ask something about the name. “Is that spelled with a K?” or “Where does that come from?” Anything that gives the arbitrary label a meaning turns it back into something like a baker.
6. Attach a picture. Carnegie’s old advice still works: link the name to a vivid image or feature. Mnemonic systems have a long record, going back to the memory palace.
7. Ask for a repeat while it still seems normal. “Sorry, I missed your name in the noise” is acceptable in the first ten seconds and gets harder every minute after.
8. Write it down afterward. A note in your phone converts a short-term name into a long-term one.

If you are caught

The Ray study found that excuses soften the damage without erasing it. Inference That suggests a fast, honest recovery that gives the person something back is better than a long apology.

An occupational therapist quoted in the Post story put the principle best. If you are within three to four feet of someone and cannot read their tag, she said, you may have a serious problem that is not about eyesight: “People need to learn to not be afraid to say, ‘I think I know you but I can’t remember your name.’”

If you are the organizer

1. Print the full name, at 24 points or larger. This is the G.I.A.N.T.T. challenge. Use a plain, high-contrast typeface. Keep the first name biggest, since it is what people say aloud, and set the last name nearly as large: a first name alone is ambiguous, and the last name is what a guest looks up afterward. One sales trainer in the Post story wants the first name at least an inch high. Put title and company below, smaller, and keep stripes, ribbons and insignia from crowding the name. The Post joked that first-name-only badges should be reserved for Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.
2. Print both sides. Flipped badges are a quiet source of mental load.
3. Hang it high. The common industry rule is shoulder height, on the right side, so the eye travels along the handshake arm to the face. Short lanyards, clips or magnets beat long straps.
4. Skip the line. Pre-print, alphabetize, or let guests find their own on a wall display. Do not make the first act of the event a wait.
5. Check spelling before you print. Misspellings were one of the top complaints in the BizBash survey. A misspelled name is a small act of forgetting.
6. Test calligraphy at conversation distance. Hand lettering is lovely and signals care. Before you commit, stand six feet from a sample. If you cannot read it, the guest cannot either.
7. Give people a reason to keep it. Make it a keepsake or part of the program, and offer a way to return and reuse the holder. This answers the waste objection.
8. Put one more thing on it. A name tells you who someone is. A second line tells you what to say to them. See the closing section.
9. Separate the two jobs. Keep the front of the badge for people: first name large, company smaller. Put the data on the back or in a code, and keep titles that rank guests (buyer, VIP, press) off the front unless the guest chooses them.
10. Make the scan a yes. Tell guests at registration what a scan shares and with whom, and let them choose, for example, topics of interest instead of a full record. Check local privacy rules with counsel.
11. Answer the planner’s objection. If the host dislikes the look, design the badge so it belongs to the room: the same material, palette and type as the rest of the event. The complaint is about packaging, so fix the packaging.

If you are an exhibitor or sponsor

1. Read the face before the badge. Look up, say hello, then glance down. A prospect who sees you reading their chest first has already started to leave.
2. Scan after the conversation, not before it. Make the scan the end of a good exchange, so it follows a yes instead of preceding a question.
3. Say what you will do with the scan. One sentence: “I will send you the spec sheet tomorrow, nothing else.” Then do exactly that.
4. Write a note on every lead. A name and a company are not a lead. What the person said they need is.