Streaver built PRN a custom badge and check-in platform that turned a slow, manual registration into a scan-confirm-print experience that takes seconds — at a fraction of the cost of the commercial tools.
The Pittsburgh Robotics Network (PRN) is a nonprofit building the robotics and AI ecosystem in and around Pittsburgh. Frequent, high-impact events are how members meet, partner, hire, and find one another — the events are the product, and the first thirty seconds of each one are the moment that sets the tone.
Those first thirty seconds weren't working. Check-in was manual, slow, and error-prone. A line built up at the door. Staff who should have been running the event were running a clipboard. And the badge itself — the cheapest networking tool in the room — carried none of the signal that membership tier would have given it.
Commercial event platforms could have solved the mechanics, but they were priced for corporate conferences, not nonprofit ecosystems. None of them integrated with PRN's membership system. None of them could put a member's tier on a badge. PRN needed something the market didn't sell.
The mechanics of check-in are a solved problem at corporate-budget prices. PRN had to solve them at nonprofit-budget prices, with the membership system wired in, and with hardware that didn't simply move the bottleneck from the staff table to the printer.
A manual table, a printed list, a marker, and a staff member double-checking spellings. Lines built up before the event began. The single biggest event-day headache, every event, and it scaled badly with growth.
OperationsCommercial event platforms could automate the mechanics — for corporate-conference money. Nothing on the market was priced for a nonprofit's recurring event budget, and nothing integrated with PRN's membership system out of the box.
Cost & FitA badge is the cheapest networking tool in the room — if it carries signal. Without membership tier on it, attendees couldn't see who was who at a glance, and PRN was leaving the most useful five seconds of every interaction on the table.
NetworkingOnce check-in goes self-service, the printer is the new bottleneck. A single thermal printer at a single table doesn't scale to event volume — and multi-location events make the problem worse. The print path had to be a distributed system, not a peripheral.
HardwareCheck-in used to be our biggest event-day headache. Now attendees print their own badges in seconds and our team is free to actually run the event.
PRN ran the buy-vs-build math honestly. The buy path was the wrong shape — wrong price, wrong integrations, wrong product surface for the badge. We came in built to the actual requirement, not to a license tier.
PRN didn't need an enterprise platform with features it would never use. It needed exactly the platform its events required, at a fraction of the cost of the commercial tools. Streaver built to the actual requirement — not to a license tier — and the math worked the moment we sketched it.
The badge had to know who the attendee was — not just by name, but by membership tier. That meant the platform had to talk to PRN's membership system from day one, not as an integration scoped for v2. Streaver designed the data model around the membership signal, not around event registration alone.
Self-service check-in only works if the print path doesn't bottleneck. Streaver had operated distributed hardware before and treated the print server as a first-class system component: multiple thermal printers, multiple locations, deterministic routing, no single point of failure on the door.
Four things flipped between the old check-in and the new one. None of them are flashy on their own — they are the ordinary mechanics of an event door, run well. Together they are why the line stops being a line.
QR scan + badge print in action — short video or sequence of stills of an attendee scanning, confirming, and walking off with a freshly printed, branded badge.
Before · After · the same event, half the friction
We made the attendee the actor. A QR code in the confirmation email, scanned at any open kiosk, name and last-four-of-phone to confirm, and a badge in their hand in seconds. No staff in the critical path. The line stops being a line the moment the attendee starts moving on their own.
We put membership tier on the badge — Core Premiere, Core Silver, Network Gold — in PRN's branded design. Status is visible at a glance, and a quick scan of someone else's QR saves their contact instantly. The badge stopped being a name tag and started being a networking device.
We split the print path across multiple thermal printers, driven by a dedicated print server, addressable across event locations. Attendees scan, the server routes the job to the nearest available printer, and the badge prints in seconds. The hardware is invisible when it works — which is the whole job.
We can show check-in time, staff hours, and delivery speed. We can't yet show what happened to attendance volume after launch — PRN's growth has multiple drivers and we'd rather not claim a number we can't isolate. Working with the team on a clean attribution for the next renewal.
Anecdotally, the QR-scan-to-save-contact flow gets used heavily — but we haven't instrumented it. The networking lift from the badge is real in the room and unmeasured on the dashboard. A pass to add lightweight, privacy-respecting analytics is on the roadmap.
The platform pulls registration data from Eventbrite and membership/tier data from MemberClicks, consolidated into one model. That split is current at the time of writing — but membership tooling moves, and we'd want to confirm it on every renewal cycle, not assume it.
Each outcome below is paired with the baseline it's measured against. The figures with TBD badges are the ones we'd like PRN's team to confirm with instrumentation before quoting publicly.
Average check-in time fell by 80%. The line stops being a line the moment the attendee becomes the actor.
Staff time on registration, reconciliation, and manual badge-writing came back to the team — to spend on the event itself.
The first thirty seconds of each event finally matched the rest of it. The badge handed to an attendee is now part of the brand, not a hand-written exception to it.
Two attendees who want to keep in touch scan each other's badges and the contact is saved. Networking moved from intention to one tap.
TBD · engineer to verifyMembership tier is visible at a glance on every badge. Status, signal, and a real reason to upgrade are all in the room without anyone announcing them.
What started as a single-event tool is now the standing platform for every PRN event — and the same engine fits any membership-driven event series.
Four engineers shipped the eight-week MVP. The same group runs the event-week support cadence — same Slack channel, same hands on the print server when the door opens.
Scoped the build, runs the per-event ops cadence, and owns the relationship with PRN's programs team.
Owns the Eventbrite and MemberClicks integrations and the consolidated data model behind the badge.
Built the self-service check-in flow and the admin tools PRN uses to run the event on the day.
Owns the print server, the thermal printer fleet, and the multi-location routing logic that keeps the door moving.
Weekly product check-in with PRN during the build. Event-week stand-ups switch to on-site or on-call hardware support — Streaver is in the room (or one ping away) the day of the event.
Shared Slack channel between the joint team. PRN holds full access to every repo, every credential, every dashboard. The platform is PRN's, not a vendor-locked black box.
Fixed-fee build for the eight-week MVP. Per-event operational support priced as a small flat fee, not a per-attendee SaaS tax. The pricing reflects a nonprofit's budget, not a corporate license tier.
Source, deployment, and operational ownership transfer to PRN at the end of the build. Streaver continues as the engineering partner, but PRN holds the option to take it fully in-house at any time.
The platform itself uses ordinary, dependable pieces. The thermal printer fleet and the print server are the part that earns the engineering attention — that's where the bottleneck would otherwise reappear.
The door problem is solved. The next phase is about turning the badge into the entry point for a richer networking and analytics layer — and scaling the same engine to PRN's larger events.
Richer attendee profiles and a deeper badge-scan flow: scan to view a public profile, save the contact, follow up after the event. The badge becomes the entry point to the network, not just a label of who's in it.
Lightweight, privacy-respecting post-event analytics: attendance, engagement, networking activity. Replace the anecdotes ("it felt busier this year") with numbers PRN can act on between events.
Multi-event, multi-day scaling — concurrent sessions, multi-track conferences, badge re-print at scale. The platform is already designed for the event series; the next phase tunes it for the larger events on PRN's calendar.
Frequent events on a nonprofit budget? We built a check-in that beats the commercial tools — for a fraction of the cost. Same engine fits any membership-driven event series.
