Events, badge scanning and the introduction email
Tagging everything you capture at a show, what a badge scanner can and cannot read, and the one message that goes out afterwards.
Add the event, then open its own page
On Contacts, add the show with its dates, then open it — every event has its own page, with Scan a badge on it. Everything captured there is tagged with that event, no matter what today's date says, which is what makes this reliable the moment an event's own dates are off by a day or a timezone.
Events are part of Business and Enterprise, as an add-on: $12 a month for each person who has it, counted daily, with the first 14 days free. Who has it is set in access groups.
A page each rather than a button on a shared list is deliberate: at a stand, on a phone, with a badge in one hand, a shared list is a row somebody can tap next to by mistake — and the mistake is which show a contact gets filed under, which is not something anybody notices until months later.
That is the whole point of the feature. Six months later, "how did Birmingham go" is a question your contact list can answer.
QR or barcode: what a badge scanner can read
Badges carry one of three things, and only one of them is readable by anybody who is not the event's organiser.
**Contact details** — a vCard, a MECARD, or text with an address in it. Common at smaller events. These are read straight into a contact.
**An identifier** — a badge number that means nothing on its own, with the attendee's details held behind the organiser's own lead-retrieval system and an exhibitor licence. This is the usual arrangement at large shows, and it is deliberate: lead retrieval is something organisers sell. Nothing outside that show can resolve one, and the scanner says so rather than appearing to fail.
**An encrypted payload** — the same idea, unreadable without the organiser's system.
Photo: reading a badge with no code on it at all
Choose Photo and it opens your camera straight away — useful for a badge that carries an identifier rather than any details, or one you would rather photograph once than line up a scan twice. Whichever you pick, Photo or QR, is remembered for next time.
The photo is kept either way, filed automatically under Contacts, then Events, in a folder named after the event, so a badge that could not be read is still a picture you have. Reachable from the contact's own timeline once one was captured.
What it reads back is editable before anything is saved as a contact — check the name, email, phone, company and title, fix anything that landed in the wrong field, then save. A field the model could not read comes back blank rather than invented; it does not construct an email address from a name and a company. It does, occasionally, put a real piece of printed text in the wrong box — an event's own name where a company should be, a barcode's number where a phone should be — which is exactly what that screen is for catching before it is in your contact list.
What it does not do: guess a person's own details. Some tools advertise scanning any badge at any event. What they are doing is photographing the printed badge, reading the words on it, and buying the rest — an address, a job title — from a data provider. Ours never does that: badges frequently leave the address off on purpose, and an address that was guessed from a name and a company was never given to anybody — which matters both for whether it is correct and for whether you were entitled to it.
The introduction email
Under Team, you can turn on one message that goes to somebody whose details you have just taken, straight away or after a short wait, so they have yours before they have forgotten who you were.
**It sends once and there is no second message.** That is deliberate rather than unfinished. Somebody who handed over their details agreed to hear from you about that; a sequence is marketing, with different rules and a different set of obligations. The message says it is the only one and how to say if it was unwanted.
It is never sent to an imported list, whatever the source column says — an import is somebody else's list, and writing to it is the easiest possible version of this mistake to make.
It comes from our address with your name in front of it, and replies go to you. That way it arrives reliably without you having to change anything about your own domain.