Project Overview

First introduced in 2017, BluePrint is UBC BizTech's flagship conference designed to empower students with the tools and connections they need to thrive in the tech industry. It is known as UBC's largest technology conference, boasting 270+ attendees, 80+ partners, and attracting 40+ companies from the likes of Google, Tesla, and Meta annually. This year's theme revolved around Getting Your Start and helping students initiate their first step into tech.

Partner Q&A panel at BluePrint 2025

Innovation

The question was: how do we innovate? Previous iterations of Blueprint had seen gamified networking, where attendees had been rewarded for scanning the QR codes of partners through points towards raffle prizes. However, we wanted to get rid of the superficiality of students only talking with delegates to gather more points. We also wanted to polish the networking experience by eliminating the common pain points associated with networking.

Research & insights

We wanted to uncover how people really felt about networking conferences to unveil insights about how we can improve them. In a survey done with 100 previous attendees, we discovered that the issue is not just forming these connections, but also maintaining them long after the event is over. On top of this, students felt as though it was difficult to navigate the overwhelming atmosphere of these events while having these conversations.

Problem Identification

Its clear that conference attendees are coming to BluePrint to make meaningful connections, but have trouble remembering who they have talked to and where to find them, making it difficult to quantify the value they received by attending.

How might we foster the connections between attendees and delegates made at BluePrint and highlight the value that each attendee gained by attending?

Our Solution

We built a mobile web app that generates custom user profiles upon event registration for every single conference attendee and delegate. Using this system as the foundation, we engineered a system that persists connections between two people, which we defined as everyone who visits your profile and everyone whose profile you have visited.

LEVERAGING NFC TECHNOLOGY

We wanted our solution to be functional, easy to use, but still come with a wow-factor that gets people talking - NFC technology presented an opportunity to do all three of those. Each attendees nametag came with an NFC card inside, and by holding your mobile device up to someone's nametag you instantly gained access to their profile which had their LinkedIn, company, and fun facts about them. Any tap interaction between two people would be counted as a connection, and party A would appear in party B's connections journal (and vice versa).

Our Impact

BluePrint 2025 was a resounding success and was awarded Conference of the Year by the UBC Sauder Commerce Undergraduate Society. The NFC technology proved to be a hit, with attendees raving about how easy it was to connect with others and how they could easily remember who they had talked to. In total, the app facilitated 4700 unique connections among a group of 270 attendees.