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Event Strategy

Music Festival & Live Event Credential Management Checklist

by Erin Chesterton
on August 17, 2021
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Credentials are the first line of defense for your festival or live event.

As a credential manager, you are the gatekeeper for access and the security of the event. With staffing shortages across the space at an all time high, many events are struggling to get the onsite security they need—putting more pressure on the credentials process as a whole to serve as an additional safeguard. That starts and ends with you.

It’s on you to get people in and out as efficiently, safely and quickly as possible. Time is of the essence as a credential manager and proper preparation up front can help you get more of it back to ensure smooth sailing the day of your event.

Credential Management Tips & Timelines

With more festivals happening in a shorter timeframe than ever before, taking the time to follow a sound process is key to speedy execution and success. So we met with Chase Wilkes, Customer Success Manager at Lennd for a behind-the scenes look at the process he follows. Chase has worked in the space for six years and had hands-on experience as an onsite credential manager for major festivals like Rolling Loud. 

He shared the ideal timeline to advance credentials and the steps that you need to take along the way to ensure success. We took his advice and mapped out everything you need to prepare for a smooth advancement of your event’s credentials. We’ll take you from three months out to the last 24hrs leading up to the event. 

3 Months Before Your Event

The first step towards a successful credential management process is looking at the big picture. Take it from Rebecca Throne, Director of Ticketing, Burning Man & Black Rock City 

“View your event from a holistic perspective first. Look at the entire picture and treat it like an ecosystem so you can understand how the different sectors impact and relate to each other. If you are designing the segments in a vacuum, you may end up with one segment that’s at odds with the other functions. Everything needs to flow seamlessly together.”

Below are the high-level tasks you should complete to map out your credentials at least three months out from your live event or festival. Remember the more work you put upfront now will save you countless hours in the long run:

1 Month Before Your Event

You’re off to a strong start and mapped out everything you need from a bird’s eye view for secure production and credentialing. Now that you’ve laid down the foundation for the advancement of your credentials, use the month before the event to get organized. 

Do a full inventory of the credentials you have, track down any outstanding requests and complete status reports to ensure everything is in order.

PRO TIP: Always ensure you set the due date for your asset requests at least 1 month before your live event. Be aggressive with your timelines—you want to leave as much time as possible for these requests.

2 Weeks Before Your Event

Now that you’ve secured your requests, use the two weeks before your event to review everything you’ve gathered and flag any discrepancies you see so you can get ahead. 

This way, you’re giving yourself and your team ample time to course correct before the days before the show and get foresight into any potential hurdles or roadblocks to successfully advancing your credentials. 

1 Week Before Your Event

Now, you’re one week out from opening night. You’ve done your due diligence to uncover any discrepancies across your requests and get ahead of potential roadblocks.

At this point you should be focusing on the finishing touches of the event, reviewing access zones and the who’s who involved at each step. Notoriously your sponsors are going to wait last minute to get you what they need—use this time to get ahead of those roadblocks and prompt them to provide details to help you move ahead. 

PRO TIP: Always bake in an extra week for gathering items and information from sponsors. 

48hrs Before Your Event

No matter how much preparation you put in ahead of your event, it’s crucial to always leave time for any last minute requests or changes. As is the nature of any event, things are constantly in flux and you need to ensure anything that can be in your control, is in your control before showtime. 

24hrs Before Your Event

You’re almost there—congrats! Your job should be 90% complete at this point in time. Reserve your last 24 hours to give one final sign off on credentials. And, as always, track down those last few sponsors you’ve been following up with for weeks (or months...)

Planning for Success: Rethinking Your Approach to Credential Management

If there’s anything you can take away from this is to plan as far ahead as you can. Don’t leave credentials until the last minute. As resource requests and supply chains are more challenging to secure, getting ahead on key details can save your event dollars and your staff countless hours, hurdles and headaches.

Given the pressure on credentials managers to execute more under tighter timeframes, the time to reevaluate and find a system that you can replicate year over year and set standards across your staff is so crucial.

Your security measures are of the utmost importance for the success of your event, and adopting an all-in-one system can give you a new level of control. But don’t just take our word from it, see what Chad Ladov, Security Expert and Founder at Unified Command says about the old way of advancing, and why now is the time to rethink your approach:

Spreadsheets, Google forms, old databases and legacy software aren’t cutting it any longer. If you can’t get it organized in advance of the event, then there is no chance you are going to have a credentialing system that is going to provide real access control at the event.”

Looking to streamline your credential management and up-level security at your next event? Discover how Lennd’s all-in-one advancing portal is leading the way. 

Keith: We did an NPS and considering this was the first event we we got an NPS of 8.3 which was was pretty good. I would I would have liked to have been a bit higher than that...but I think part of it was this is a new event for a quite a few people. So feedback was people wanted to ride the same course, they wanted to ride the exactly the same course. We did have these people that were coming in very technical and other that were there for fun. right but we add some really serious people so the serious people wanted everything like a rulebook we had no rulebook so maybe we could have done a better job sort of catering to those different grou

LENND, INC

Lennd is a next generation event technology platform that simplifies operations and planning so event teams can work smarter, move faster, and improve their ROI. 

To learn why some of the most respected event teams trust Lennd to power their operations and learn more about our virtual event tools sign up for a demo: www.lennd.com.

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