This works fine for me, and I just use a bit of paper with the name written on it. Poppet magick is one of my most successful forms of workings, and one of my most practiced. You didn’t even need the name, you just need to know who you mean and that they exist. Your subconscious knows who and where they are.
The trick in sympathetic magick, is that you see the poppet AS the same thing as the target person. For your purposes, it IS them, you can talk to it as them, you bind it as them, you drown, burn or freeze it and that action symbolically done on the poppet harkens to the target because the poppet is the target.
EA talks about this in one of his books, where he made a poppet out if play doh, no link at all, he made it in the shape of a heart, stabbed it with extreme vengeance, they died a year later.
Use strong intention and imagination, and it works. The reason being, it’s not the poppet or the link doing the work, that’s all you. Believe that it is so, feel the energy, and so it is.