How Conference Attendees Actually Swap Contacts Now

Paper business cards are having a slow, ordinary death at exactly the events that used to hand out the most of them. A stack of cards from a two-day conference used to sit in a jacket pocket for a month before anyone typed the details into anything, and most of them were never typed in at all. What has replaced the card is not one thing. It is a phone photo of someone's badge taken in a hurry, a LinkedIn request sent from memory a week later once the name has half faded, or a screenshot of a name tag nobody can quite place by the time the request lands.

An event the size of Web Summit Qatar, arriving in Doha from 31 January to 3 February 2027 at the Doha Exhibition and Convention Centre, produces this problem at a scale a paper card was never built for. Thousands of attendees each have a handful of conversations worth following up on, and the actual bottleneck was never handing someone a card. It was finding a reliable way to be found again once the hall had emptied.

The practical answer is not a scanner, and it is not an app that promises to replace the business card outright. It is giving attendees a directory they actually choose to be in, and a simple way to tell people they are at the event at all. Get the mechanics wrong, and a fading habit just gets replaced by a directory nobody trusts either.

The business card is fading, and nothing has properly replaced it

None of what has replaced the card actually solves what it solved. A badge photo sits in a camera roll until the moment has been forgotten, a LinkedIn request sent from memory a week later arrives without enough context for the other person to place who sent it, and a screenshot of a name tag rarely survives being scrolled past on the way back to whatever photo someone actually wanted. Each workaround depends on somebody doing the follow-up themselves, after their attention has already moved on to the next thing.

An event the size of Web Summit Qatar, running in Doha from 31 January to 3 February 2027 at the Doha Exhibition and Convention Centre, shows the scale this problem actually operates at. Thousands of attendees leave with a handful of conversations each worth continuing, and the part that was genuinely hard was never the handover itself. It was being findable again once the hall had emptied and everyone had scattered to their next flight.

Two different jobs: being seen, and being findable

An "I'm attending" card, made from the organiser's own artwork with the attendee's photo, name, role and company placed on it and shared to LinkedIn, does a different job to a directory entry. It tells the attendee's own network that they are at the conference at all, before anyone there has had the chance to meet them. A paper business card never did this part: it only worked after a conversation had already started, handed over at the point two people were already talking.

A directory entry does the opposite job. It waits for someone who is already at the event, looking at who else is around, and gives them a way to start a conversation with a role and a company already established rather than a name badge glimpsed across a room. Between the two, an attendee at something like Web Summit Qatar can be visible to their own network before the event has even opened, and findable by someone standing a few metres away once it has.

Neither one is a business card in the literal sense of handing someone a number the moment you meet them. What they replace is the two habits a card was actually standing in for: telling people you went, and giving a stranger already at the event a way to reach you again once they were.

Why an opt-out directory does not work, however well it is designed

Publishing everyone by default is a decision made on an attendee's behalf before they have had any say in it. Some people ask to be removed. Most simply tolerate it. A smaller group who would genuinely have enjoyed networking stop trusting the app for anything else too, because it has already shown it will publish information about them without asking first.

None of this is a design problem that a better interface fixes. It is a consent problem, and it shows up as a directory that looks full and is mostly noise: outdated job titles, entries nobody meant to leave public, and a handful of people who never wanted to be listed at all.

The irony is that the people most likely to avoid an opt-out directory are often the ones with the most interesting things to say, senior enough to be cautious about how their details circulate, or simply someone who came to listen rather than to be found. Losing them from the directory is not a rounding error, it is losing exactly the people the feature was meant to surface.

What opt-in actually changes

With Eventiere's guest networking, nobody appears in an event's directory until they switch it on themselves. It is one toggle, controlled by the attendee, alongside a short profile: role, company, a line or two about themselves, and a link to LinkedIn or Instagram if they want one attached, all part of the guest networking feature described on the features page. Leaving it off costs them nothing elsewhere on the guest page, it simply means they are not listed.

Opting in does not mean handing over everything at once, either. Each attendee separately decides whether their email and phone stay hidden until another attendee sends a connection request and they accept it, or are shown to everyone in the directory outright. The two decisions, whether to be listed at all and how much to show once listed, stay entirely in the attendee's hands.

It is worth noticing what this does to the numbers an organiser sees afterwards, too. A smaller opt-in count is not a sign the feature failed, it is a sign the toggle worked as intended. Treating it as a shortfall, and pushing attendees to switch it on, undoes the very thing that made the people who did opt in trust it enough to bother.

• A single opt-in toggle the attendee controls, off by default
• A profile built from role, company and a short bio, not a full registration form
• Separate control over whether email and phone are shown to everyone or only after a connection is accepted

The photo nobody has to take twice

Attendees at an Eventiere conference guest page can already find their own event photos elsewhere on the platform, so a directory profile picture can be picked from one of those, rather than asking for a fresh upload. It is a small detail, but it removes one of the more common reasons a profile gets abandoned halfway through: nobody wants to stop and take a new photo of themselves just to appear in a conference app.

This also solves a smaller but real problem with any directory photo: consistency. A photo pulled from the event itself was taken in the same lighting and the same venue, often on the same day as the conversation someone is about to have off the back of it, rather than a headshot from a different year or a different job.

What to ask attendees for, and what to leave alone

Role and company earn their place, since they give another attendee a reason to start a conversation. A short bio helps someone decide whether that conversation is worth having. A professional link, if the attendee wants one there, adds context without adding much friction.

Phone numbers and email addresses need more care. They matter once two people have actually agreed to connect, and matter much less, and carry more risk, sitting open to a room of strangers who have not asked for them. The same reasoning applies to photos themselves, covered in more depth in event photo consent: default to sharing the sensitive detail once someone has actually asked, not the moment they join.

None of this needs to be a long form. Four or five fields, each genuinely optional beyond the toggle itself, does more for completion rates than a form that reads like a job application. An attendee filling in a directory profile between sessions has a couple of minutes, not an afternoon.

Do not make it a condition of anything else

The temptation is to attach directory participation to something an attendee actually wants: checking in, a session, or their own photos. That is worth resisting. The moment filling in a profile is required to get something else, it stops being opt-in in any meaningful sense, and the information collected that way is worth less, since people filled it in to get past a gate rather than because they wanted to be found.

Keep the directory as its own invitation, offered once someone has already had a good reason to trust the event, rather than bundled into registration or check-in where it reads as one more form standing between an attendee and what they came for.

The same logic applies to timing. A profile prompt that appears the moment someone registers, before they have been to a single session, is asking for trust the event has not earned yet. Offering it once someone is already at the venue, or once the first day is under way, asks at a point where saying yes actually means something.

Telling attendees what they are opting into

A short, plain message beats a long privacy notice. Tell attendees the directory is optional, that they control what is visible, and that leaving it blank costs them nothing. Organisers who say this out loud at registration or in an opening announcement see more genuine opt-ins than ones who leave the setting buried in a menu and hope people find it.

It is also worth being clear that this is not the same thing as a sponsor scanning badges for leads at a booth. Getting attendees to actually engage with and share their own event photos is its own subject, covered separately in why conference attendees are not sharing their event photos. The directory is attendee-to-attendee networking, aimed at other delegates, not exhibitors, and conflating the two in how it is explained is a fast way to make attendees suspicious of both.

A single line in the welcome email or the opening address does most of the work: joining the directory is entirely optional, attendees choose what other attendees can see, and nothing happens if they skip it. People who hear that once are more likely to trust the toggle than ones who find it buried three taps into a menu and have to guess at the rules themselves.

A quiet directory is still a working one

Do not judge the feature by how many people opt in during the first hour. A directory with fewer, genuine entries is doing more for the people using it than one that looks full because it was populated for them. It costs nothing to leave the feature switched on for an event where turnout is modest, and nothing is lost if most attendees choose to stay off it. For the wider picture of keeping a conference audience engaged beyond the directory itself, see the conference attendee engagement playbook.

It is also worth resisting the urge to compare directory numbers between events. A five-hundred-person product launch and a fifty-person board retreat will produce very different opt-in counts for reasons that have nothing to do with whether the feature is working, mainly how well people already know each other going in.

Try it on your next event

You can try guest networking and "I'm attending" cards on a free Eventiere account: 300 photos a month across unlimited events, no credit card needed (full details on the pricing page). Start free and see how many attendees choose to be found, and how many share that they went at all.