Nametags at Conferences: Five Problems You Can Easily Avoid

Nametags at conferences have one main purpose, and one related subordinate purpose:

• Make it easy for attendees to identify each other and each other's organizations.
• Make it easy for attendees to pretend to remember people they've met, but whose names they've forgotten.

This yields five possible ways nametags can fail:

1. The type is too small, often because the nametag focuses on things like the conference name—even though everyone knows what conference they are attending—rather than the participant's name.
2. The type for the participant's name is large, but the name of the participant's organization or department (when the conference brings together people from various groups) is small, or even entirely omitted. That's bad, because knowing a stranger's organization can be a great icebreaker—"Oh, you're from the Judean People's Front; you must work with my old classmate Otto," or "You're the guys who work on sanitation, medicine, education, and wine; my colleagues and I just litigated a wine-related case in Anderson County, Texas …." (Related problem: Poor color contrast either for the participant's name or the participant's organization.)
3. The nametag is hanging down on a lanyard by the participant's bellybutton, so one has to look there in order to pretend to recognize someone.
4. The nametag is hanging down on a lanyard by the participant's bellybutton, so when people are talking over a meal, the nametag is below the tabletop and thus invisible.
5. The nametag is flipped around, which is especially common with those lanyard hanging-down-by-the-bellybutton nametags.

The solution to #3 and #4, of course, is to have the traditional clip-on nametags or things like them (some versions use magnets) and not the hanging nametags. If you want to offer both a clip and a hanging option, that's fine, and it might be helpful for the people whose clothes lack lapels, and who can't attach the nametag to the clothes' neckline. But absolutely have the clip or the magnet as at least one of the options.

(I've blogged about this before, but I was recently at a couple of conferences where I ran into some of these problems, so I thought it was worth mentioning again.)

Comments

[Currentsitguy]

Seems like the old stick-on "Hello, my name is" tags eliminate most of this.

[Mr. Bumble]

Especially if placed on the forehead.

[Currentsitguy]

Hey, when you all look equally ridiculous it has a certain leveling effect.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

I do that most of the time. It has the added benefit of giving people an excuse to look at the nametag. A lot of people try to pretend they aren't trying to read the dang thing. This way they have a fine excuse.

[MatthewSlyfield]

Assuming they stayed stuck, which was a problem.

[BrianL.]

The best thing I saw someone put on one of those "Hello My Name Is" tags was "Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die."

[Currentsitguy]

I LOVE IT!!!

I need to remember this for whatever conference I attend next.

[David Nieporent]

My wife got me a t-shirt with that exact thing: a black shirt with a design made to look like a name tag, with that written on it.

Which I am wearing right now while sitting at my desk in my home office.

[Michael P]

#3, #4 and #5 are all largely addressed by a lanyard that attaches to the top corners of the badge, treated than the center -- at least for a large badge.

[MatthewSlyfield]

No, that would only inherently address #5. #3 and #4 are mostly an issue of the length of typical lanyards, and how the lanyard attaches to the badge does nothing to address it's length.

[apedad]

We're in the middle of the 21st century; maybe we should have something better by now.

How about a virtual business card floating above everyone's head!

[Frank Drackman]

Thanks,
filed under "Problems, First World"

Frank "Don't you hate it in First Class when they put too much Angostura Bitters in your Old fashioned?"

[bernard11]

OK Frank.

That's a good one.

[Krayt]

3. The nametag is hanging down on a lanyard by the participant's bellybutton, so one has to look there in order to pretend to recognize someone.
4. The nametag is hanging down on a lanyard by the participant's bellybutton, so when people are talking over a meal, the nametag is below the tabletop and thus invisible.

Damn straight.

Should be hanging up by the boobs.

[Currentsitguy]

It would definitely get noticed then, plus it would eliminate all that "Stop talking to my boobs" nonsense. 😉

[jimc5499]

Another use of nametags is to group people.
When I went back to college, I had to attend an orientation at the Student Union. I went and checked in and was given a nametag. As I was walking through the Union some of the Student Groups glared at me and some went so far as to give me the "bird". I had no idea what was going on until it was pointed out to me that the color of my nametag meant that I was a Veteran. We had just gone back into Iraq and some of the Liberal Socialists weren't to fond of Vets. The Dean of Students and I had words about it and I told him that I wouldn't be in the Union that much because the majority of my classes were in the evening.

[bernard11]

One suggestion:

Wear the tag on your right, not your left.

That makes it easier for someone you are shaking hands with to see and read it.

[Mr. Bumble]

Is there a right to anonymity at a conference?

Asking for a friend

[MatthewSlyfield]

No. Most conferences are not free and/or open to the general public.

An unstated function of name tags is verifying that you are a paid attendee to conference organizers.

[Rossami]

Nothing unstated about that. That is in fact the primary reason that the conference name is printed in large type even though all the attendees know what conference they are attending - it's so the facility staff can more easily identify and eject the freeloaders.

[arbitrary aardvark]

In 1992 I went to a computers privacy and freedom conference in DC. It was a neutral space where white hats and black hats could sit down together, programmers, cops, hackers and lawyers. When I checked in my badge was missing, so we handwrote one. That evening I was at a table listening to a Bruce Sterling speech. One of the people there was a high school hacker who had gotten in by taking my badge. We became friends.

[David Nieporent]

Come on; it's easy to identify the freeloaders: they're the only ones pretending to pay attention to the speakers.

[DaveM]

No, no, none of these throwback solutions express the true modern spirit of America. What is needed is for every participant to be issued a pair of Google Glass glasses so we can use Augmented Reality to surround each participant in a different, glowing color that identifies their Federal racial category, a floating pronoun preference centered on the target's nose, and a special secret handshake code that gets fed via the headphones so the people working for the intelligence agencies can know who's working the room with them.

[Currentsitguy]

Somehow seeing the world through the eyes of The Terminator just doesn't hold a lot of appeal.

[Purple Martin]

A few months ago I read The Centenal Cycle (centenal is a word created to designate a cohort of 100 people). It’s kind of a political cyberpunk technothriller set in a global/local political structure enabled by extended Google/Meta-type technology. Think of it as a cross between Gibson’s Neuromancer and Woodward & Bernstein’s All the President’s Men.

It takes the less the dystopia you just described (and aren’t we all tired of dystopias?) and changes it to it to a morally neutral, fully pervasive “Internet of Things” collecting-everything-with-all-info-fact-checked/instantly-accessible-everywhere), as an assumption underlying and necessary to the story (yeah, does require willful suspension of disbelief).

Get past the conventions of the technothriller genre, and the global societal political part is interesting (choose to be a citizen of only one, 100-person nano-country, based on its governmental theory and laws, and ally that centenal with as many other centenals, world-wide, as desire to live under those rules. Global power in that world is based on how many centenals vote to join you either in a single government, or in federations sharing basic principles but differing in their specific implementations).

As to a review, the first of the Cycle’s three books (titled Infocracy) is decent world-building supporting a pretty good political plot, but the thriller aspects start sending the plot downhill in book two, to a crash-and-burn in book three. Total words should have been cut in half—a problem not uncommon with writers starting with an assumption of a trilogy so they can sell three books instead of one.

[Don Nico]

I hate name tags and almost always refuse to wear one unless they are necessary to get a drink or food.

[Currentsitguy]

They should at least have some practical information, such as:
"If found drunk, please return to room 407. Keycard in left front pocket"

[Don Nico]

Thank could be helpful

[PFSchaffner]

We solve #5 by making the tag 2-sided: flip it around and it looks the same.

[TwelveInchPianist]

“ The nametag is hanging down on a lanyard by the participant's bellybutton, so when people are talking over a meal, the nametag is below the tabletop and thus invisible.”

Pro tip: simply use your phone to discretely take a picture of the person’s name tag under the table. What could go wrong?

[Adam S.]

The “belly-button” and “tag flipped around” problems are why I much prefer the magnetic name tags.

When issued a lanyard tag, I tie a knot in the cord to effectively shorten it so it hangs mid-upper chest instead of belly-button level.

I also wish tags would be printed with the person’s first name in larger type than the last name. In a big conference where I’m meeting lots of people what I’m really going for is first-name recall.