Effective Photography Opt-Out Policies for Events
At Abstractions, we tried a new method for allowing attendees to opt-out of photography. I will explain the reasoning behind our decisions and why I think it is a more effective way of preventing someone from being photographed without their consent.
The current standard, explained in the next section, is good on its face. As event organizers, however, it is important to critically evaluate the way we implement systems meant to make our guests more comfortable and their effectiveness.
Common Implementation
The current standard at events is to use different colored lanyards with red, green, and yellow matching the international standard for traffic control lights. Typically red means “do not take my picture ever”, yellow means “please ask before taking my picture”, and green means “you may take my picture.” At some conferences, the color system is different. For example, Strangeloop 2016 used white for yes, grey for ask and, black for no.
Problems with the Current Standard
The first problem with this is sourcing. When buying lanyards, you don’t know how many attendees will opt for green, yellow, or red. This means to guarantee everyone is happy, you must buy one of every color for every attendee. Lanyards typically run between $0.50 to $3.50 per piece depending on quantity and quality. Abstractions was 1,500 people and our lanyards cost about $1.39 each. This means $2,085 worth of red, $2,085 worth of yellow, and $2,085 worth of green would have been necessary to make sure everyone had their choice of color. That’s $6,255 of unnecessary over-spending.
Colored lanyards are very deficient when it comes to co-existing with attendee wardrobes. People like to wear red, green and yellow shirts and because of this, their lanyards will blend into their clothing. Red, green, and yellow have the potential to blend into clothing for the color-blind. Additionally, lanyards are easily covered by hair or clothing. Eventually at events, attendees take their lanyards off. For example, I’m writing this blog post from the second day of a conference. Of the 18 people in my line of sight while writing this sentence, just 6 of them are still wearing their lanyards on day two. They’re distracting, uncomfortable, and a signal that you are in an unfamiliar place.
Often, lanyards at an event are sponsored by a company looking to get their name out to the conference attendees. That means your lanyards may have a printed logo on them and the colors red, green, and yellow may not fit well with your sponsor’s brand. The different hues may also blend in with other confounding environmental elements.
Not every event uses lanyards. More often these days we are seeing wristbands as a registration system. Smaller events may not be able to afford lanyards because they are expensive and instead use paper stickers.
A Different Solution
We believe that creating a system that is simpler will encourage more people to be happy with their level of participation in the system and therefore happier with their overall event experience. At Abstractions, we put signage near registration directing attendees to pull their own wristband from a box of inexpensive green tyvek wristbands. No need to choose a certain lanyard color for those that don’t care about being photographed, and those that do care can easily grab one of the hundreds of wristbands available just for them.
We decided to use florescent green wristbands because it is highly visible on cameras. It will stand out in the viewfinder as a photographer lines up a photo. If someone still mistakenly takes a photo that includes someone wearing a green wristband, they will quickly see it standing out and be able to delete that photo. Red seems to be the apparent solution here because of traffic lights. This is not a traffic control system though. Red is a pretty normal color for someone to wear in their regular wardrobe. It is especially common for women to wear red bracelets or bangles. The florescent green that we used is pretty unmistakable and also less common to be worn.
Wristbands are very inexpensive, even when upgrading from paper wristbands to tyvek like we did. For just $41.67 shipped, we were able to buy 1,500 wristbands. Not only are they inexpensive, but they’re reusable! We have leftover wristbands now that can be used for all of our future events and the signage was branded in a way not specific to the event. Branded lanyards would’ve been thrown out unless the sponsor was immediately ready to sponsor a future event.
Problems with Our Solution
Wristbands are limited in a few ways that are certainly worth considering
- Long sleeves: While long sleeves are less common at software conferences, like I am typically used to organizing, they are a possibility and may be more prevalent at other types of events or at different times of the year. This is the easiest of the problems to solve and people will naturally roll up their sleeves on their own without any formal policies.
- Wrists being out of frame: In looking through our photos from Abstractions, I was able to learn a few things about the placement of this signal. Occasionally someone’s wrists would be out of frame or hidden. I feel the problems with lanyards are just as likely to cause a problem, but luckily wristbands have a natural tendency to fix themselves because poses that do not include wrists are likely someone’s back or an consented, intentional headshot.
- Disability: This is a hard one to solve. If someone has a disability that prevents them from wearing a wristband, such as being born without arms, then we aren’t able to respect their wishes to not be photographed. In this case, I believe a good solution is to fall back to an old system. If you are using sticker badges or lanyards, simply attach the green wristband to the lanyard or sticker badge. If you are using a 100% wristband based approach, you have already thought through how to accommodate these guests and should accommodate them for photos as well.
