Event Planning
6 tips for tackling risk at your conference
Feb 01, 2023 / 4 min read
By: Edyta Gorzon, Director of Customer Success
Besides developing a strategy to achieve various goals, every conference organizer must also understand elements that might jeopardize all that hard work invested.
Understanding risk factors is the first step towards tackling risk at your conference. Risk management is an important topic in conference planning, as failing to recognize potential problems can significantly affect many areas (e.g., if the safety of attendees is not considered, it could lead to lawsuits).
In short, risk management is the act of eliminating risks associated with involvement in any event.
In event planning, risk can manifest itself in everything from equipment and power failures to food safety concerns or withdrawal of sponsors.
You may have faced some challenges and probably have the same idea that the best course of action for tackling risks is to plan early and often.
A common mistake is to conduct risk management from an overall event point of view. Risk management has to be considered at each stage of event production, considering potential sources of risk such as human resources, finances, marketing and attendees.
When conducting risk management, you should begin with an assessment of your conference risk using three stages:
Identifying potential hazards that might occur
Calculating the possibilities of each risk
Analyzing what could happen if it occurs
As some conference risks have higher priority than others, you should determine the priority levels of each risk.
Once the risks and hazards have been identified, event organizers should develop a risk management plan to reduce, eliminate or decrease risk threats at their conference.
The last step is to work on a conference crisis management plan, which is a complex challenge for event organizers. This plan helps prevent or decrease unanticipated situations to protect people, property, reputation and assets. These six steps can help you to formulate a plan:
1) Create a list of key emergency contacts for distribution
This will help your team quickly identify important information, especially during time-sensitive situations.
2) Identify team members to join a crisis planning committee
The committee’s responsibility is to help act in an emergency.
3) Create a crisis communication plan
Define different protocols for information-sharing with various stakeholders and define who is responsible.
4) Establish systems to help your team detect early warning signs
Define alarm (or ‘red flag’) zones for constant monitoring.
5) Identify crisis response procedures for everyone
Define actions to be conducted by each responsible person and additional ‘plan B’ steps if all goes wrong.
6) Emergency simulations
Practice makes perfect! Simulation tests might help you see that procedures are good enough but must be optimized to improve. Also, they speed up your team’s response time, making it smoother and more efficient.
As information and circumstances change constantly, crisis management requires you to continuously gather all sorts of information that might affect conference risk assessments and adapt quickly.
Once you identify potential risks and develop a crisis management plan, you should be ready to face possible obstructions.
Once it happens, your plan is tested for real. At some point, you will have to decide whether to cancel, postpone, or go virtual with your conference. Each decision has its pros and cons.
It’s different from canceling a small internal meeting than canceling a conference with thousands of attendees, as it’s the worst-case scenario for any organizer. When dealing with a difficult decision such as cancellation, organizers have to assess if the benefits of making an alternative plan outweigh the costs. If not, then consider canceling your conference.
Postponing your event gives you additional time to alter and rerun it in the future. Be careful how far you should postpone your event, as this can generate multiple consequences.
Going virtual isn’t an equal replacement for an on-site conference, but it is better than canceling it altogether. Re-evaluate the goals of your conference to see if they are achievable in a virtual environment, and only then should you consider moving your event.
Once you plan to tackle risk at your conference, it’s time to act. This includes sending information to all stakeholders (i.e., attendees, speakers, sponsors, and service vendors) since communication is key to tackling risk at your conference. If you're using a professional event management platform, this can be achieved seamlessly with automation to explain different stakeholder groups differently.