When you’re in the event industry, ensuring that your events run safely and smoothly isn’t just an ideal to strive for—it’s part of the job description. Keeping everyone safe, engaged, and well-informed can be an enormous challenge; add a pandemic on top of it, and event planning has become more taxing than ever.
In March, we held Part VI of our Pandemic Compliance & Safety at Live Events virtual series, to bring together three very experienced event professionals and discuss tips and lessons learned along the way as they planned and executed large scale events across the country during a pandemic – Ryan Costello, Chief Strategy Officer of Membersuite and Co-Founder of Event Farm, Jennifer Ross, the Founder and CEO of JHR Global Events, and Amanda Gayle, Director of Conferences and Meeting Services for the American Nurses Association.
Here are the takeaways from the panel discussion.
Missed Part VI of the Pandemic Compliance and Safety at Live Events panel series?
#1. We Have a Duty of Care
While there’s a lot of new focus on how much responsibility we as event planners bear for attendee health safety, the reality is we’ve always had the duty to keep our audience safe. In the past, that may have included fire codes or metal detectors, but the responsibility was still there.
“It is a duty of care, and just like with anything we do when we approach events as event professionals our job is to make people feel welcome, make sure that they’re safe make sure that we’ve established and created an environment for learning and education and networking that follows all the rules and regulations that need to happen for meeting events,” Jennifer said. “So why isn’t it our responsibility not to continue to do that as it relates to health safety? It’s just another layer of what it is that we’re doing.”
In response, Costello recounted a time when, at an event 16 years ago, an attendee at a large music event dropped dead after walking in the doors. Fortunately, due to a quick response and a plan of action that included an on-site ambulance, the man was revived and lived to tell the tale. But that decision, Costello notes, convinced him of the imperative to always have event safety protocols in place—no matter what the challenge.
The bottom line? Our event guests trust us to create a safe and inviting space for them to connect and engage. It’s simple; it’s our job to do that.
#2. Choose Your Location Wisely
Venue and location have always been significant pieces of the event puzzle; that hasn’t changed. But what has changed—a lot—are the many different mandates and regulations put in place by various entities at different levels of government that affect what people think is normal safety protocol.
If you’re looking to create your own rules and regulations for attendance—and you should!—choosing a venue that will support that effort is even more important.
One approach is to choose the least stringent areas—for example: Florida, Texas and Arizona, who have looser mandates than other areas of the country—and have an open space in which to set whatever protocol you feel is necessary.
“I work with risk management companies all the time, and they have the tightest, strictest rules, and they’re going to the leanest, easiest states to be in so that they can enforce what they want to enforce,” Ross said.
The most important thing to take away from this is that everyone on your team, including the venue employees, security teams and anyone related to your event, needs to not only know the rules, but follow them explicitly.
“Everybody has to be on board with them—from your senior leadership, all the way down—and your staff needs to understand why those rules are in place and how it affects them,” said Gayle. “You set the rules for your organization. Be very clear about it, and don’t waver on it.”
#3. Stringent Rules Don’t Equal Low Attendance
There’s no question: creating stringent masking or vaccination rules around events is sure to make even the most experienced event planner nervous; what if it impacts attendance? But is that actually a valid concern?
According to Costello, probably not much. In his experience with Event Farm, it’s actually the opposite.
“Because of our event registration platform, we can actually get data to see registration spikes correlate to rules’ announcements,” he said.
Fairly, though, in some of these cases, the environment matters. The response from a team member who is being required to attend a sales conference will likely have a much different one from a patron of Coachella—which is held outdoors and typically a much younger audience. Still, there is the argument to be made that people who truly want to connect with others will comply with the rules in order to do so.
Ross added, “We have found—across a bunch of different industries and a wide range of them—that people legitimately want to be in the room together, and if this is what they have to do to be in the room together, they’re going to comply.”
#4. Enforcement Matters
We all agree that having rules in place is great, but what happens when you have someone who just won’t follow them? It’s bound to happen, so knowing how you will handle it before it does is crucial.
For one, make your expectations clear before and during the event. Attendees should, from the point of registration, see communication about event rules and safety protocol, and agree to your Code of Conduct before purchasing a ticket. From that point forward, the message should be clearly and consistently communicated.
And when it’s ignored? Well, you have to be willing to enforce it.
“At our recent event, we had a ‘three strikes’ rule, and we had one exhibitor who just would not comply,” said Gayle. After being warned, he was asked to leave and escorted away by security. “Luckily, it didn’t turn into anything more than that; the rest of the booth staff were in compliance, but he was the only one that wasn’t. But they were pretty irritated with him.”
Ross agreed. “It really is all about that key upfront communication,” she said. “Let them know. Tell them again. Tell them again. Make them check a box on your registration site that says, ‘I acknowledge these rules.’ Then they can’t say they don’t know, because they have to acknowledge it when you register, and so you just kind of have to deal with them.”
#5. Contingency Plans are Key
In a COVID world, the likelihood of someone catching the virus at your event is still a possibility, even with all the safety precautions and enforcement that you’ve put in place. Fortunately, if you’ve taken all the right steps—communication, planning and enforcement—you can sleep well at night, but you still need a plan in place for when—not if—it happens.
“We can’t possibly guarantee that no one will get COVID, but what we’re trying to do is create enough comfort rules that people are okay with the smaller risk,” Gayle said. “Try to reduce the total number of options where you can get it.”
To learn more about how technology can help you keep attendees safe and streamline your event safety protocols, check out Event Farm’s Safety Toolkit. To watch the reply of Part VI – Experiences From Event Pros in the Field, click here.
Check out all recaps of the Pandemic Compliance & Safety at Live Events virtual series: