Entries by Sarah Varner

3 Things Event Organizers Should Know About Facial Credentialing

As organizers start exploring faster, more modern check-in options, facial credentialing is entering the conversation. But between privacy concerns, conflation with facial recognition (there’s a difference, more on that below), attendee adoption, and the practical question of whether it’s worth the investment, there’s a lot to sort through. Here are three things worth knowing. 

1. Your attendees already understand the technology. 

Consumer adoption of biometric technology is already well ahead of the events industry. Nearly 70 percent of people have used biometric authentication and consider it faster and easier than passwords. Half of all air travelers used biometric identification at an airport in 2025, up from 46 percent the year before—and 85 percent of those who used it reported high satisfaction. Of people who use facial biometrics on their devices, 68 percent use it to unlock their phone or laptop. The familiarity is there. And it’s growing. 

Wicket, (not the AMS company) which provides a facial authentication platform trusted by professional sports team venues across the NFL, NBA, MLB, MLS, and NHL, has surpassed one million opt-in users and processed over eight million biometric transactions. And it’s not limited to stadiums. Salesforce’s Dreamforce, a B2B conference of roughly 50,000 attendees, has seen a 60 percent enrollment rate, with 80 percent of enrolled attendees using it to check in. Facial credentialing is already working at significant scale in environments that look a lot like yours. 

2. It solves a problem you might not realize you have.

Event check-in has gotten faster over the years. Barcode scanning and self-service kiosks have shortened the process on the system side. But for events that use barcode scanning, the attendee still has to do their part before the scan can happen—setting down their bag and coffee, finding their phone, searching for the confirmation email, adjusting screen brightness and zoom so the scan works. For events using name or badge ID number lookup, the process is simpler but inherently slower. Either way, there’s friction that the current processes can’t eliminate. 

None of these preparatory steps show up on a spec sheet, but every one of them adds time and effort, both physical and mental. These small tasks stack up and can make something simple feel effortful. In that first moment of an event that should be welcoming and engaging, it can be a detractor. Your attendee won’t say check-in was frustrating, but they’ll feel the effect of those small moments of friction.

Facial credentialing removes them entirely. Enrolled attendees approach a check-in station, are authenticated in less than one second, and retrieve their badge from the adjacent printer. No phone, print out, or laborious process required. Check-in becomes something attendees simply walk through instead of think through. 

3. Trust is earned, not assumed.

The unlocking-the-phone analogy only goes so far. When attendees unlock their own device, they feel in control. When someone else’s system is authenticating them, the dynamic shifts. Earning that trust comes down to how organizers communicate and implement the technology. 

It also means understanding what this technology actually is—and what it isn’t. Facial recognition identifies unknown people. It scans a face and searches an extensive database to figure out who someone is, often without their explicit knowledge or consent.  

Facial authentication confirms a known person: someone who has deliberately opted in and chose to use the system in this way. Because it’s consent-based by design, it aligns with biometric privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA. One is designed to identify people who don’t know they’re being scanned. The other is designed to welcome people who chose to participate. 

The most successful deployments share a few things in common: 

Enrollment is always voluntary and removable. No attendee should ever feel pressured or expected to participate, and they can change their mind at any point. Making it opt-in isn’t just a privacy best practice. It’s what builds the trust that drives adoption in the first place. 

Transparency starts in the registration flow. When attendees understand exactly what happens with their data—that the enrollment photo isn’t what’s used to authenticate them, that the system converts it into an encrypted biometric template that can’t be reconstructed into an image of their face, and that they can request removal at any time—enrollment rates go up, not down. 

The alternatives are always available. Attendees who don’t enroll can check in the same way they always have. Barcode scanning, manual lookup—nothing changes for them. Facial credentialing adds an option. It doesn’t take one away. 

Privacy is the foundation. The right partner builds privacy into the architecture, not as an afterthought. That means no crowd surveillance and no data shared with or sold to third parties. 

So, What Now?

Facial credentialing is gaining traction in the B2B events space. The question is whether you’ll be the organizer who introduces it thoughtfully, earns trust, and delivers a check-in experience that matches the rest of what you’ve built. 

See It in Action

Curious? Come see it for yourself. eShow will be demonstrating Express Entry—our new facial credentialing option, powered by Wicket—at the ASAE Annual Meeting & Exposition in Indianapolis, August 15–18, at Booth 425. Visit our booth to do a sample enrollment, then walk up to the demo check-in kiosk, get authenticated, and see how quickly a badge is printed. 

 

Originally published on associationsnow.com

July 28, 2026 by

Mid-Year Check-In: 5 Event Technology Shifts to Consider for Fall and 2027 Planning

Summer is a strange season for event professionals. Some of you are heads-down on a Q3 or Q4 event and the pressure is real. Others have already turned the page to 2027, mapping out next year’s calendar, budget, and RFPs. Many of you are doing both at once.

Here are five shifts worth considering — some in time to influence a fall event, some worth folding into your 2027 planning. Either way, the choices you make in July and August tend to shape how the next stretch runs.

1. Reassess the check-in experience

Check-in is the first thing every attendee, exhibitor, and speaker experiences at your event. It’s also one of the shortest windows to influence how the rest of the day feels for them. A long line or a slow lookup at 7:30 a.m. affects sessions, exhibitor traffic, and staff bandwidth for hours afterward.

Registration and badging technology has moved quickly in the last 12 months. On-demand badge printing and self-service kiosks are increasingly standard. Opt-in facial credentialing is now a real option — eShow launched Express Entry earlier this year, giving attendees who choose to enroll a fast-track check-in path alongside every traditional method.

Worth asking now: what does check-in actually look like on day one of your next event, and what would you change if you could?

2. Look at what your event data is really doing for you

Event organizers collect a lot of data — registration numbers, session interest, exhibitor activity — and use only a fraction of it to inform the next event. Too often it sits in reports nobody opens after the debrief.

Two questions worth asking, whether you’re heading into a fall event or scoping 2027:

Are you pulling registration insights during the cycle, or only after? Real-time visibility into pacing, source, and segment tells you what your marketing is doing while there’s still time to act on it.

And what happens once attendees are onsite? Registration tells you who showed up. Movement and behavior data — sessions attended, booths visited, dwell times — tells you what they actually did. That layer is where a lot of the interesting decisions live for 2027 planning. It’s also where eShow’s new take on RFID badges is focused, with an attendee behavior dashboard deploying in Q4 this year.

3. Plan for the reality of late registration

Late registration has become the norm rather than the exception. Most event organizers can confirm it from their own recent numbers — a growing share of attendees now register in the final days and weeks before an event, often in the same window when operational plans are locked, F&B counts are in, and printed materials are ordered.

That’s not solvable by pushing harder on early-bird promotions. It’s a planning problem now — for a fall event, and even more so for how you scope registration timelines, cutoff policies, and onsite processes for next year.

A few things worth pressure-testing: How late can you accept registrations without cascading effects across sessions, catering, and badging? How quickly can your team turn around a late-add — a new registrant on Tuesday for a Wednesday event? And what’s your process for the registrant who shows up onsite having never registered at all?

The organizers who handle late registration well aren’t the ones with the tightest cutoff. They’re the ones whose systems and processes flex without breaking downstream.

4. Give exhibitors better tools before the show, not during it

Exhibitor satisfaction comes down to lead capture and follow-up. Exhibitors who feel their leads were poorly captured — or their post-show reports were incomplete — remember it when they’re deciding whether to book next year.

Two things worth doing between now and your next show: talk to three or four of your best exhibitors about what they wished had gone differently at the last event, and audit whether your lead retrieval tools give them what they actually need. Rating, notes, exports — the basics matter more than the extras.

5. Understand what's shifting in badge technology

Badges themselves are having a moment. On-demand printing solved one problem. What’s next is what a badge can actually do once it’s printed — RFID and NFC chips turn a badge into an active data source, capable of tracking movement and engagement across the show floor without asking attendees to scan anything.

eShow has an RFID/NFC badge rolling out in Q4 2026, paired with an attendee behavior dashboard that layers movement data with registration data — so organizers can see attendee activity alongside the person behind it. If you’re building your 2027 technology plan now, this is worth understanding before your RFP goes out.

Where to go next

If you want a closer look at what’s new and what’s coming — Express Entry, RFID/NFC badging, and the attendee analytics dashboard — we’re hosting a webinar on August 12 called What’s New at eShow: Facial Credentialing, RFID, and Attendee Insights You Can Put to Work.

If you’re evaluating your event technology setup more broadly, we’ve been building event technology since 1996 — we’re happy to walk you through what an integrated platform looks like.

July 27, 2026 by

Three Patterns Event Organizers Are Seeing After an Event Tech Vendor Acquisition

Event tech has seen a flurry of M&A activity in the last year. Platforms have been acquired. Some have been acquired again. The trade press covers the major deals — but the experience on the client side gets less attention.

Talk to enough event organizers right now and the same patterns come up. The platform isn’t keeping up. The team that used to know the show has turned over. Or the renewal conversation isn’t happening at all.

The specifics vary. The dynamics fall into three patterns.

Pattern one: the slow drift

The relationship doesn’t end. It just stops being what it was.

After an acquisition, service cultures often get restructured. New owners introduce tiered service models, with the highest-touch experience reserved for the largest contracts. Mid-market and smaller clients move to a different track — same platform, different experience.

The people who knew the show start leaving, too. The founder who built the relationship, the VP who knew the event inside and out, the account manager who picked up on a Sunday — these are the team members who often leave within 18 to 24 months of an acquisition. Institutional knowledge walks out the door with them, and clients are left explaining their show from scratch to people who weren’t there for the last five years of it.

Nothing about the software changed. Everything about the experience did.

Pattern two: the strategic exit

For some clients, the timeline ends with a notification email.

As part of this transition, we will be focusing our services on a more defined segment of the market. Your contract will be honored through its current term.

Translation: the new owners reviewed the book of business and decided you weren’t in it.

This is the sharper end of the same dynamic. A new owner — usually a PE firm with a 5-to-7-year hold and a return target — looks at the acquired company’s client base differently than the company’s founders ever did. Which clients are most profitable? Which require the most service relative to revenue? Which segments align with the broader portfolio strategy?

The clients who don’t fit get a polite exit. Sometimes at renewal. Sometimes mid-contract, with services sunsetting at the end of the current term. Either way, the window to evaluate, contract, implement, and train on a new platform is suddenly measured in months — not the 12-to-18-month runway most associations and show organizers would prefer when changing core event technology.

Pattern three: the disconnected stack

When two companies merge, their often products don’t merge with them — at least not for years, and sometimes not at all.

Full technical consolidation is expensive and time-consuming. The acquiring company often runs both platforms in parallel, markets them as one, and asks clients to live with the seams. Registration sits on one system. Exhibits sit on another. Conference management sits on a third. Even when the logins are unified, the platforms underneath frequently are not.

For organizers, this shows up as data that doesn’t flow between modules, integrations that need maintenance, support tickets that get bounced between teams, and no single person accountable when something breaks across systems. Clients end up managing the gaps themselves — moving data manually, troubleshooting handoffs, and absorbing work the platform was supposed to absorb for them.

The architecture is the acquisition, frozen in place.

Questions worth asking right now

Organizers can’t control whether their vendor gets acquired. But there are signals worth tracking, and questions worth asking — ideally before a renewal cycle.

Ask the vendor directly: What is your ownership structure, and has it changed in the last three years? What is your projected service model for clients of our size over the next contract term? Who on our account team has been here longer than two years? Is your platform built on one system, or assembled from several?

Ask internally: Does our account team still know our show the way they used to? Are we managing gaps between modules that shouldn’t exist? If we received notice tomorrow that our current platform would no longer serve us, how long would it take to evaluate, select, and implement a replacement?

None of these conversations are comfortable. All of them are easier to have before something changes than after.

A different kind of stability

Several event tech platforms have been acquired, restructured, or sold at least once. A small number haven’t.

eShow has been founder-led since 1996. Same founder, same company, same architecture — built as one system from the start, on a single codebase and a single database. Registration, exhibits, conference, mobile, and onsite all run on the same foundation, with one team accountable for all of it. No private equity, no portfolio strategy, no book-of-business review coming next quarter. The account team that knows the show this year is the same one that will know the show next year.

That doesn’t make eShow right for every organizer. But for associations and show organizers feeling the drift, facing a transition they didn’t ask for, or tired of managing the gaps between systems that were never built to work together — it’s worth knowing which platforms in the market are structured to still be there in 10 years, and which ones are structured around a different timeline entirely.

June 9, 2026 by

What’s Really Changing in Event Tech (And What It Means for Your Events) | Event Technology Consolidation

The announcements keep coming. Another acquisition. Another “exciting merger.” Another post in your LinkedIn feed about how the change will “serve you better.”

But reading between the lines, something bigger is shifting.

The consolidation wave

Private equity firms have been on a tear across event technology. One firm alone has been steadily acquiring companies that handle registration, lead capture, virtual events, video content, venue sourcing, and more, bundling them for “your benefit”. Other well-known platforms have been scooped up by holding companies with operational efficiency expertise, but zero event industry experience at all.

The pitch to organizers sounds appealing: all your tools, now under one roof. One company to work with instead of five. Simpler. Better. Unified.

But is it?

When "One Platform" isn't always one platform

When a PE firm acquires multiple event technology companies, the logos may change. The sales pitch definitely changes. But the technology behind it? That change doesn’t happen overnight, if it happens at all.

What you’re still left with is multiple products, built by different teams on different architectures with different databases, just wearing the same brand name. The registration system doesn’t natively share data with the lead capture tool because they were never designed to work together. They were designed by separate companies, for separate purposes, and then stapled under one roof after the fact.

And then there’s the people part

There’s a second cost that’s harder to see from the outside but easy to feel when you need help.

Acquisitions bring “operational efficiencies” leading to restructuring. Restructuring brings layoffs, eliminating redundancies. And too often, the people who get cut are the ones who knew the product best, who understood how your specific event was set up, who you could call when you had a last-minute question two weeks before your show. That institutional knowledge doesn’t transfer in a handoff document.

And it’s not just support teams. When the leadership behind your platform keeps changing, the vision changes with it.

Who’s behind the curtain?

None of this means every acquisition is bad news, or that every PE-backed company stops caring about its customers. But ownership structure is worth paying attention to, because it’s often a signal for where change could come from.

A company backed by private equity is typically building a portfolio that leads toward a successful “exit strategy”, i.e., reselling what they bought and packaged together. A publicly traded company reports to shareholders every quarter. A company with constant leadership changes may still be figuring out what it wants to be, where it’s trying to go. None of those things are wrong, but they do shape how decisions get made — what gets prioritized, where budgets get cut, how fast things change.

As an event organizer, you already have enough to manage. Venues, speakers, sponsors, registrations, logistics, a timeline that never has enough margin. The technology behind your events should be something you can count on, not something you’re keeping an eye on.

It’s worth knowing who owns your vendors and what they’re building toward. Not because the answer is necessarily bad, but because it helps you understand what might change and whether you’re comfortable with that.

We built eShow for the long run

eShow has been in the event technology business for 30 years. We’re independently owned and founder-led — the same founder since day one, with a vision that continues to evolve as the industry and organizer’s needs change. We’re not backed by private equity, we don’t report to shareholders, and we’re not building toward an exit. We answer to our clients.

Our platform was built as a single system from the start. One database, one architecture, with modules designed to work together from day one. It wasn’t assembled through acquisitions and rebranded. It was built this way on purpose. Registration, conference management, expo management, mobile app, onsite technology — all natively connected, sharing the same data without relying on APIs or exports to move data from one system just to upload into another. Whether you’re running a trade show floor, a conference schedule, or both, the information flows between them because they were designed that way from the start.

That’s what we mean by one platform.

One platform. One relationship.

Want to talk about what this means for your event? Let’s connect.

April 13, 2026 by

What to look for in conference management tools in 2026

Conference planning has always meant juggling moving parts — abstracts coming in from one direction, speakers needing bios and headshots from another, room setups and AV orders from a third. For years, the standard approach was to patch it together: a submission portal here, a spreadsheet there, email threads holding the rest in place. That […]

January 23, 2026 by