No event day will pass without incident, and a proactive approach to incident management before the event will make your event-time operations a lot more effective.

Here are our 6 areas that you should plan in advance of your event to make sure that you are ready to deliver effective, efficient and accountable incident management when required.

1. Checklists. For typical incident categories - fire, lost child etc - you can plan key response steps beforehand. Make sure your on-site team know where this information will be, and they can carry out templated steps if a certain incident occurs. Much better than making it up as you go along in the heat of event day!
2. Contingency Plans. For risks that might become live issues during your event, you need to know the contingency steps to follow if the worst does happen. In practice this is similar to the above checklists, but rather than for typical incidents, it is for risks that you identified earlier in your planning.
3. Software. Effective incident management requires effective tools to report, record and resolve incidents. The right incident management software gives you everything listed here - checklists, contingency plans, an event log, effective communication - as well as an indelible audit trail for you to refer to after the event.
4. Communication Channels. Incident management requires effective communication - plan how staff and contractors should communicate. Who talks to who when an incident of a certain severity or in a certain location occurs?
5. Relationship with Operations Centre / Event Control. Ensure your staff know the role of your centralised control centre, and how to interact with it when an incident occurs. The most severe incidents might well be managed directly from the operations centre, whereas others might be resolved on the ground with the operations centre simply being kept informed.
6. The Event Log. Incident management is more than just things going wrong - have a log of crucial information and timings for the record. This might include events such as 'gates open to the public' or 'competition starts'. Having a log of this type of information is important for accountability and will help you learn from the event for future run sheets, incident management and other operations.

There is a lot that can be done before the event to make your event-time incident management a lot more proactive. Follow these 6 steps and you'll go into your event feeling ready to deal with any incident that occurs.

WeTrack's incident management software enables you to do all of the necessary prep beforehand and then record, resolve and report on incidents intuitively and effectively during and after the event. Get in touch to learn more, or watch a demo introduction to WeTrack.