A call for lanyards and badge-holders

March 9, 2011 by Dave Haynes

Based on a lot of feedback from the big Preset Group Mixer in Lost Wages a coupla weeks ago, the Toronto mixer last night featured the amazing new innovation of name tags – with names scrawled with a Sharpie on the $5 “Hello, My Name is …” stick-on your chest things I got at Zeller’s on the way downtown.

Well, good idea, but the damn things don’t stick.

Brian Ardinger of NanoNation had a tweet up today about a company that was turning iPhones into name tags, with some sticky stuff that let you dangle the phone around your neck and cycle through intros and tweets. Cool, I thought, until I realized me and everybody else would have to buy iPhones, and people with them would have to sign waivers not blaming me for when the sticky stuff gave and the $600 phone dropped to the floor.

So … what to do, what to do.

If I saved all the lanyards and badge-holders I brought home from trade shows we would probably have enough for everyone who attended last night, and the EventBrite toolset could help me print all the attendees names in nice little slide-in identifier tags. But like most people, the holders and lanyards end up in a bin.

So I am thinking two things:

1 – Someone in our little sector probably has a box of these left over from some show they organized or sponsored, sitting up on a shelf doing nothing. I doubt many people would care what’s on the lanyard as long as it doesn’t say Hitler Youth Meet-Up 1938!

2 – Maybe someone in the sector wants to spring for a lot of, say, 250 that would have their brand on the lanyard and probably get us through several mixers, assuming many people hand them back in at the evening’s end and just a percentage forget and toss them out at home.

That way, we kiss sticky name tags goodbye and have something that should work well. If you have surplus or are interested in springing for the tags, let me know.