At All About Events we work on a lot of event management plans for various events and offer a plan review process as a service. During this process we see the same mistakes made over and over again, once you know the trends, use them to avoid making the same mistakes for your event.
1) Improper structure of the event management plan
Your event management plan is often the first introduction a stakeholder has to your event, this is especially relevant if you are a first time event or new to this particular county council or venue. First impressions count and this document will often pave the way for your relationship.
It’s important to clearly waymark your event management plan, this can be achieved by creating a detailed and easy to adapt appendix system. Put all the detailed information for your event in the appendix, this allows you to keep a succinct cover plan and lets you to add and take away from the document without annoying formatting issues.
Formatting issues and general untidiness of the document generates a poor and unprofessional first impression for your event. It’s an easy one, keep things neat and tidy to generate a feeling that your event is organised for the reader.
2) Not providing the detail required to reduce further questions or a safety advisory group
The purpose of the event management plan is to provide all the information that an external stakeholder needs to know about an event. It’s important that all the relevant information is included in the document, if it isn’t this will generate more questions for you and will likely lead to you being invited to a safety advisory group to get the answers. Although we believe a well structured and research focussed safety advisory is always a positive exercise, many of the questions can be mitigated with a quality event plan.
An example of a situation in our sector when lack of detail would be an issue could include only providing the first start time and last finish time for a cycle sportive. A highway authority or parish council relies on knowing when a section of road is live with the event and when peak flow is expected to be. In this situation it is critical that a full key route timing document is submitted with the event management plan, including all the settlements, key points on the route and different rider speeds.
It is also important not to include irrelevant information to fill out the document, this will make for tedious and unnecessary reading.
3) Visible mistakes from copy and pasting another event plan
With the event season being so full on at times it is important that the processes you go through for writing event management plans are efficient. Therefore, it is expected that at times you will make use of template event management plans that you already have in place. However, if you do use the strategy it is important that you thoroughly read the plan through to ensure it flows properly and there are no references to previous events (or at worst, someone else event!).
4) Assuming that a generic risk assessment covers all elements of your event
As all event managers are aware, risk assessments create the base for mitigations put in place to improve safety on our events. Therefore, it is important that risk assessments are generated for all elements of events. The base for this will normally be a generic risk assessment covering a broad range of risks, locations and activities. From going through the review process of a number of event management plans it has become clear to us that often this generic risk assessment becomes the overall risk assessment for the event. However, it is imperative that activity specific risk assessments are generated for the most detailed activities. For example, if an event manager was risk assessing a running event, a full route risk assessment must be included on the turn by turn basis which would then generate a list of mitigations that the route managers on event day could implement.
5) Contingency planning and emergency procedures not adapted properly to fit the event
An event management plan is an opportunity to outline all of the emergency procedures and contingency plans that you will put in place for your event. The final common mistake we have outlined here is that often these contingency plans and emergency procedures have not been written specifically or adapted properly to fit the event in question. This is important because it allows external stakeholders to understand the processes that you as event managers are likely to go through if something was to go wrong or an emergency was to occur. If done properly, it reduces the amount of communication required between all the different stakeholders to implement the action and therefore speeds up the reponse at the time of the incident.
If you need assistance with an event management plan, advice or just want a chat then feel free to get in touch by emailing josh@allaboutsportsevents.co.uk
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