New feature: vCards

It seems forever since we’ve announced a proper new feature.

While we’ve been putting in a bunch of work on Tito, a lot of the changes and improvements have been infrastructure-based and rather behind-the-scenes.

Therefore it gives me great pleasure to be able to share vCards with you today — something that has been on many of your wishlists for quite some time.

What is a vCard?

That seems like a good place to start if you’re not familiar with them! vCards are contact records encoded into a QR code. Where most QR codes these days are basically a URL to take you somewhere vCard QR codes can give you the name, email, etc. of someone without needing to visit another website. A modern-day machine-readable business card if you will.

The great thing is you don’t necessarily need any fancy software to see how this works. If you’re running the latest version of iOS for example, just go to your camera and hold it up to the QR code in the banner image above...

What can I use vCards for?

In an event context vCards are often printed onto attendee badges and used for “lead capture”, i.e. sponsorship booths at events that (with consent) want to capture your personal details for follow-up, or adding to a mailing list. The vCard can also be used to exchange contact details with other attendees.

Using vCards as an exhibitor

As an exhibitor you’ll want to be collecting data from multiple attendees and since vCard is a standardised format there are a number of apps out there to help manage this. An example that some of our customers have used in the past is from BadgerScan which has free apps for iOS and Android.

No spoilers just yet but we may have something of our own to share on this front soon... okay, that was a bit of a spoiler.

The importance of consent

When collecting data via a vCard (or anywhere else!) for marketing or other purposes, whether bound by GDPR in the EU or not, it is important that consent is gained from the data owner. Under GDPR you are also required to inform the data owner how the data will be used and whether it will be shared with any other 3rd parties. Finally you must state your data retention period and provide a way for the data owner to withdraw consent.

Enabling vCards

By default vCards are disabled for events, but you can enable them via Settings > Ticket settings. Read more in our help article.

Exporting vCards

Once enabled you can use the Attendee export to get access to the URL of each attendee vCard. The URL can be used together with your attendee data and mail merged to produce badges.

So that’s a whirlwind tour of our new vCards feature. If you end up using it at your future event we’d love to hear about it!