## **A Round-Up Of Conference Swag Favorites**

The best conference swag I’ve ever received was an extra phone charger battery (pre-charged). As the Director of Online Marketing at SparkPost, I take an interest in the items we choose to give away (and what items resonate with people), as we’ll periodically host giveaways on social media – Jennifer loves any excuse to send out swag to our community members.

Recently I was reading my Twitter feed and another Jennifer (@sigje) who helps organize devopsdays in Silicon Valley, asked a simple question that got some great responses:

> Random internet question for conference goers.. what kind of stuff do you find valuable for companies to give away?
>
> — Jennifer (@sigje) May 16, 2016

She took the conversation further by asking, “_Beyond the booth giveaways, what about the specialty items that they do drawings for? So often it’s drones right now. What do people value?_”

The responses were overwhelming. They ranged from a Macbook Pro with an app store gift card to really nice pens, Swell water bottles or functional USB hubs. I think it really depends on the audience, don’t you? I am a marketer, so I recently dropped my business card in a fishbowl at a conference for a chance to win a 3-D printer – I mean who wouldn’t? Can you imagine what I could make with one of those? I would have dropped my business card in there a hundred times if it had increased my chances!

But the fundamental problem with booth giveaways and raffles is that you know you are going to eventually be nagged by a sales person to buy their product or service. Am I right? So you’re more apprehensive and less willing to let booth staff scan your badge or drop your business card in, unless you really think it’s worth it. I mean if you could just sneak up to the booth without anyone seeing you and snag some swag, that would be the best – but that’s not realistic.

At events we’ve sponsored in the past, we’ve given away various t-shirts, flasks, graph pads, bottle openers, laptop stickers, iPads, iWatches, drones and BB-8s. On social media, we’ve given away [Stance Star Wars socks](https://web.archive.org/web/2/https://www.stance.com/starwars), Star Wars comic books, and recently in an email we gave away limited-edition client library laptop stickers (which you might still be able to score at a future dev event). But we’ve never really asked you, what would _**you**_ find most valuable? Let us know in the comments below and maybe you’ll see it at a future event or on social.

p.s. Of course, you can always get one of these [free dev t-shirts](http://pages.sparkpost.com/bl-free-dev-tshirt.html) for signing up for a SparkPost account – we have women’s dev sizes as well!