Badge scans are not congress measurement
Badge scans and symposium headcounts are easy to collect and poorly correlated with business impact. And listening only during congress days captures about 30% of the signal.
A congress is one of the largest lines in a medical affairs budget. The way its success is measured has not kept pace with the size of the bet.
What gets counted today
In a report published in August 2026, Indegene describes the metrics most pharma organisations still use to evaluate a congress: badge scans, symposium headcounts, event survey Net Promoter Scores, post-event email open rates. Its assessment of them is blunt. These are metrics that are easy to collect but poorly correlated with actual business impact.
What they have in common
Every one of them measures the same thing: physical presence. Someone was in the hall. Someone was in the room. Someone opened an email three days later.
Presence is a real signal. It is simply not the signal that justifies the spend. A badge scan tells you an address was captured. It does not tell you whether anything was understood, remembered, or acted on.
What they miss
The same report lists what falls outside that frame: scientific resonance, competitive dynamics, audience sentiment, and downstream engagement opportunities. These are the things that determine whether a congress moved anything at all.
Indegene calls the result a visibility gap. Brands invest millions and cannot credibly answer whether their data presentation drove more conversation than a competitor's, or whether discussion after the event is trending in the right direction.
The congress is longer than the congress
There is a second problem with counting only what happens on site. Indegene estimates that organisations listening only during congress days capture roughly 30% of the available conversation signal.
The majority of what a congress generates happens in the weeks on either side of it. Measuring only the three days means measuring the smaller part.
What a measurable after looks like
The alternative is not a better survey. It is a destination that keeps existing after the hall empties, and that produces a readable signal while it does.
Medical teams at large pharma groups create a Juisci space on their key therapeutic areas or congresses, and onboard physicians directly from their booth. The space keeps publishing peer-reviewed science after the event. The team sees what is actually read, by which specialties, over months rather than days.
That is a different kind of number. Not how many badges were scanned, but how many people came back.
Peer-reviewed journals. Supervised by our medical team. Data hosted in the European Union, GDPR.
What matters, and why.
Source
- Indegene, Maximizing Congress Social Listening in Pharma, 13 August 2026.
Talk it through
Book 30 minutes with our team and we will show you what happens after the booth comes down.