Digital Event Badge Solution for Contactless Registration

Event managers and organizers understand the importance of conference badges. The badges help organizers recognize their guests and keep a track of the attendees. Over time, the traditional paper cards have been replaced with a digital event badge that is mobile-friendly, cost-effective, and equally convenient to create.

The term “Digital Badge Solution” isn’t new to the world of event management. However, the sudden restriction on physical interactions due to the recent global pandemic made event managers rethink their business functioning. As a result, the need for digital badges was never more urgent.

According to Statista,

87% of the events were cancelled in April 2020 in the US alone, 

while 66% of the events were postponed.

At this, event organizers seek online platforms that help them create a digital event badge that is easy to scan and offers the same functions as the traditional ones. However, getting one designed from the scratch requires time and money.

Business owners can provide a common ground for the organizers here, allowing them to add an event, guests and generate digital event badges that can be emailed to the attendees. 

Our Laravel Development team recently had the opportunity to develop a similar platform for a client. The platform will help the client serve event managers. Event organizers can use the solution to create events, add and categorize attendees, create a digital event badge with QR code, email it to an attendee, and monitor the event. 

How does Contactless Event Registration work?

Event registration is a complex process. And printing event badges only adds to the complexity. While there are several event registration solutions to resolve this complexity, none of them offer contactless registration features. Therefore, our recent project was both challenging and out of the box.

Here’s how our contactless event registration and badge printing software solution works:

• Create and customize events
• Add attendees as per different categories
• Invite attendees through an email
• Create dynamic digital event badges with QR code for interested attendees
• Send confirmation email to attendees with their digital badge as attachment
• No-contact scanning of digital badge while attending the conference
• Detailed monitoring of all the attendees

A digital event badge by our solution is mobile-optimized and the event staff can scan it directly from the guest’s phone. Every feature is aligned with the way a conference is managed during pandemic restrictions, making it an ideal contactless event management platform.

Developing Digital Event Badge Solution: Our Approach

Building a tailored solution from scratch has its own perks. The first one is its ability to avail features that pre-made solutions often skip. But then again, adding those features need additional efforts. In our case, confirming users who will actually attend the event was a challenge. 

Given that the events have to be less populated, organizers will hate to lose any more attendees just because of lack of communication. An invitation email was the answer, but then again we had to brainstorm the cases where invitees fail to attend. We came up with a plan that will be discussed in the latter half.

Creating Event on Digital Badge Solution

The platform broadly consists of two user roles: 

• Business Owner/Platform Provider as the super admin.
• Event Organizer who uses the platform for managing events 

Registered organizers are offered a separate backend to create and manage their summits. Organizers can add the event name, type, and date to initiate the event badge creation process. Once added, the organizer can find the scheduled conference in the events list, as shown below.

Forwarding with that, organizers can introduce the attendee categories to the event. The platform offers separate fields for each category to add the attendees. The organizer can directly upload CSV with attendee details to add a large number of attendees.

The organizer can next add the slot time for each session along with the maximum number of allowed attendees to each category.

Personalized Invitation Emails

The events comprise attendees from various designations. Organizers would like to send separate emails to the VIPs, C-suitors and the employees of the same organization. Our platform saves the organizers from spending hours writing customized emails for each user. 

At the time of event creation, the organizer introduces the types of attendees and the list of users for each category. The platform offers few pre-designed customizable email templates for each category. The email templates have dynamic tags for the attendee’s name, event details and time slot.

The mails contain custom-designed options to track the response. The users can accept the invitation with a tap. Being centrally designed, the organizer is notified if the receiver will attend the event. Event organizers can track the status of the invitation emails, as shown below:

But what if the receiver fails to confirm?

We brainstormed the process and offered multiple pre-designed templates for these cases as well:

• Reminder Email: To remind the users that the invitation mail is awaiting a response.
• Referral Email: If the users confirm their absence, they can refer one of their friends to attend the event. Our solution to the digital convention badge sends a Referral email as an invitation email to the new guest.

Digital event badges are sent to the inbox of users who confirm their availability.

Customizable Digital Event Badge with QR Code

Event organizers love to offer unique attendee badges. Our digital event badge solution gives them the desired freedom to customize the badges. 

Organizers can enable the fields with easy toggle options. If they want just the first names on the badge, the solution helps with that. They don’t want the country name printed, a toggle does the task, as shown in the GIF below:

A real-time badge preview allows the organizers to find the changes on the go. We believe in the Way-You-See-Is-Way-You-Design approach for effective customization. Being created dynamically, organizers can save hours at tailoring one badge at a time.

Our solution can generate convention badges with QR code in bulk. In the process, we have used the Bar code generator library that helps to add barcode to custom event badges.

The attendees receive mobile-optimized digital badges in PDF or PNG format. Your guests don’t have to carry a physical badge for on-spot verification. Their mobile phone does the job.

Downloadable Reports

Digitally creating an event badge is helpful in more than one way. Not only it makes the badge creation process swift and easy, but also helps keep a track of the attendees. Being centrally designed with on-spot staff in the loop, it gets easier for the contactless event registration platform to track the guests who have physically attended the event.

The platform generates detailed reports about the attendees:

• Users who were denied for attending due to exceeded capacity limits
• Users who confirmed that they will not attend 
• Users who were submitted as referrals
• Users who have attended the event

Organizers can gain insights into the events and can download complete reports as Excel sheets.

What does it hold for the Business owners?

The custom digital event badge solution is a centralized platform where business owners and organizers can stay on the same page. As a business owner, you can keep a track of multiple organizers at a time, offering them an online platform to manage their event registrations and delivering the much-needed custom conference badges. 

The web app built by our custom software development agency allows owners to create customized plans for their business. Added to that is the freedom to position their brand logos wherever needed. Not only that makes you popular among the organizers but also with the users.

Summing up with our Custom Digital Event Badge Solution

The pandemic is going to have a lasting effect on every business niche. Hygiene and capacity limits will be followed for years. Above all, the ease to carry a digital badge that can be readily scanned is definitely the future of event management.

This wasn’t the first time when our team of experts offered an industry-specific solution. In one of our recent blogs, we discussed the development of custom Sports booking software. The solution eventually helped the users find and pre-book courts. 

If you too want a similar solution for contactless event management, you can contact us. Now that our developers have already designed a custom event badge solution from the scratch, tailoring one to fit your unique needs won’t take long.