When you issue replacement badges, do you invalidate the old ones?

Jan 14, 2024 / 2 min read

By: Edyta Gorzon, Director of Customer Success

Printing badges for event attendees is straightforward: an attendee registers for the event, a badge is printed, and everything seems fine.

Or, rather, it is fine until a badge is reported lost and needs to be replaced.

Of course, you can print and issue a replacement badge, but if the original badges are not invalidated, replacement badges might mean that you have stowaways at your event. If both original and replacement badges are considered valid, you will have no way to know if they are all being used, and if you have people at your event who shouldn't be there.

Sure, you can refuse to issue replacement badges, but there will always be people who genuinely lose or forget their badges. I have seen events asking for a fee for badge replacements, but you can never ask for the whole ticket fee, and it always leaves a bitter taste with those attendees who genuinely lose their badges.

This is not how you should be doing it. The right approach here is proper badge management.

When a replacement badge is issued, the previous badge needs to be invalidated. If that badge has been secretly passed on to another person who shouldn't be at the event, that person should be practically locked out with that badge.

What does that mean in reality:

If you practice entrance control to the venue, scanning an invalidated badge should issue a warning.
If you practice session entrance control, with staff scanning badges at the entrance of session rooms, that scan should report invalidated badges, and they should be denied entrance to the room.
If you practice self-service session check-in, people who use invalidated badges should not be able to register for sessions.
Establishing connections between attendees by scanning each other's badges should be blocked for people with invalidated badges.
Lead retrieval should not work for attendees with invalidated badges.
When an attendee approaches the registration desk, either to register or to ask for a replacement badge, the system should know and warn if that attendee has already registered, and if they already have badges issued.
Reporting on attempts to use invalidated badges (to perform any of the actions listed above): whose badge it was, when did it happen, what did they try to do?

Needless to say, run.events fully supports proper badge management, which includes badge invalidation, badge replacements, and checking for badge validity at global and session entry controls. This way, you don't need to choose between blindly issuing replacement badges without any safety net, and refusing to issue replacement badges: you can safely issue replacement badges and cover all use cases, without any business damage to you, and at the same time without annoying your attendees.