We figured it would be an excellent time to reflect on how you are doing so far.
How do you think your year is evolving?
We’re aware of the summer of festivals, and we know your customers are paying big bucks to have fun.
But, that brings the potential for threats to your operation.
From issues to incidents, you must be prepared for all things.
How would you measure your efficiency?
If you’re not sure how to measure your ability, here’s a question for you: as an event manager, how stressed are you?
If your stress level is high, there’s a very high probability that your efficiency could be lower than you need.
We get it; knowing this is overwhelming.
But we’re going to help you get through it and understand the areas of your operation you should address to reduce this stress.
We’ve created a principle that helps you understand your current strategy – it’s called the ACDA Principle™ (pronounced act-duh).
It covers the four areas of your operation: Awareness, Communication, Documentation, and Analysis.
We encourage you to refer to the Principle regularly.
It’ll keep your efficiency high, and your stress low.
INCREASE AWARENESS
Increased awareness affords you and your staff the ability to respond to one more incident in a little less time.
Trust us. You need all the extra time you can get.
Provide text messaging software as a channel for customers to instantly report issues, and for staff that may not have incident management mobile apps.
In many cases, incidents have gone unnoticed or escalated before adding thousands of extra eyes to assist in reporting issues.
For staff, valuable time may be saved by eliminating the need to first find a supervisor with an incident management mobile app to report an incident.
Give your team the ability to log into a web-based system from any location.
Team members can then simultaneously enter and update incidents for all your staff to see in real-time.
Make sure that data is never lost due to a bad Wi-Fi connection.
Have a system that allows your staff to enter data in an off-line environment for future upload, syncing as soon as Wi-Fi is available.
Now your team knows what’s happening and when ensuring all issues are being handled promptly keeping your customers and staff safe.
ENHANCE COMMUNICATION
Closing the communication gap during your event is the cement that brings all your documentation and data into practice.
Harness the power of Wi-Fi and supplement your communication with online and offline ability.
Provide your frontline staff with mobile apps to quickly and efficiently report incidents.
Equally, this will let you give them real-time info on new trends you’re finding from your analytics.
See how this all comes together?
Creating an easy-to-learn set of communication procedures that include mobile apps, automatic alerts, and notifications gives you a painless and manageable way to train staff too.
Automate information to empower your staff and watch communication among team members excel.
When you enhance your communication, your team is in the know.
It leads to increased awareness of incidents occurring during your events.
CAPTURE ACCURATE DOCUMENTATION
Proper documentation is the only thing that will provide you and your risk management team with liability defense.
Let's face it, you never know when you will need it, and so you must document every incident every time with all the details.
Eliminate often illegible handwritten notes and replace them with secure historical digital records.
If records need to be accessed in the future, no need to find the employee that wrote them to decipher them because now your info is reliable.
Digital records are generally accepted in liability defense, unlike handwritten notes which may not be.
With digital records, changes are tracked, so you know who wrote what and when changes to the record were made.
Give staff the ability to attach and quickly reference documents (pictures, videos, statements, etc.) with each incident.
The key to gaining accurate documentation is to create a system that allows your staff to record information while they are performing their job.
This workflow integration ensures their job performance is never compromised by their need to document what they're doing.
Accurate, legible, and historical records provide substantial benefits to reducing your risk and enhancing your staff’s efficiency during events, but first, you need to know what your team is up against.
This is where analytics comes in.
You can’t analyze what you don’t know.
Have the documentation so you can measure your risk, and then communicate what you know to your team repeatedly.
GET REAL-TIME ANALYSIS
Analysis is a critical part of your operation that allows you to learn and adjust your strategy and tactics.
Having and using analytics within a software solution is crucial for the efficiency of your operation.
Use them to improve your processes and strengthen your protocols.
Analytics gives you insight into your operation so you can enhance every event.
Here’s a perfect example of why you need analytics: response times.
Response times influence every area of your operation.
Faster response minimizes the short-term and long-term impact of incidents occurring during your events.
So, when you see a pattern such as your customers experiencing dehydration, you’ll be ready and better prepared for it.
This is how you save lives!
Now once you have the data, you can chew on it and communicate it to your team.
That way, when it is the event time, everyone is better aware of what is happening.
OVER TO YOU
Doing these four things for all your events may prevent us from bothering you with an encore on this topic.
Remember, you can’t communicate what you don’t know. You can’t understand what you haven’t analyzed. You can’t analyze what you don’t document. Make your event legendary. Document it. Analyze it. Communicate it. Be aware of everything.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in June 2014 and has been updated for comprehensiveness and freshness.
