Tag: tips&tricks

David Sonntag Talks New Event Venue Outlook on LMG s The Road Ahead Podcast

COMPANY NEWS, EVENT INDUSTRY, EVENT RESOURCES, LIVE EVENTS, TIPS & TRICKS, VENUES

I recently had the pleasure of guesting on Les Goldberg s 39th episode of LMG s The Road Ahead podcast, alongside Lauren Chelf from AOAC International, and Diane Kovats from ISCB, to discuss negotiating and navigating event venues through the COVID-lens.

I d love for you to give our chat a listen, or keep scrolling for what you need to know when planning a post-pandemic event. 

1. Pay attention to event size vs. event capacity. Just because a venue can

   accommodate 1,000 attendees, doesn t mean that the city or state will allow that many people to gather just yet.

2. Review requirements and regulations. Safety measures and restrictions vary drastically from state to state, and city to city. The hotel, convention center, or event venue itself is also likely to have an additional set of rules. Ask upfront and get details in writing.
3. Determine venue staffing needs. Hotels and event venues are just as excited to be back in action as we are, and welcome the opportunity to bring back furloughed team members. It s crucial that your event venue has enough experienced staff working now to handle your events needs. (Because we all know there s more to a flawless event than the event day itself.)
4. Consistent, coordinated communication regarding COVID safety. Both the event venue staff and the event producers must be on the same page when it comes to communicating and executing COVID safety measures. These could include mask wearing, temperature checks, COVID tests, cleaning measures, and on. For example, a venue, city or state might not require temp checks, but the event producer and client does for all attendees and staff. Share safety requirements before the event takes place with all involved parties, in order to manage expectations and equal treatment across the board.
5. Internet is essential. We ve encountered venues that are willing to improve Internet service and create hot spots, and others who are not. As Les says in the podcast, he d prefer Internet over air conditioning these days, it s just that important. Amen.
6. Hotel room rates are often negotiable. Holding a large-scale company meeting or conference in a hotel? So far Team dB has found that there s a lot of wiggle room with room rates.
7. Hybrid events are here to stay. Yeah, I said it. Not your jam? Think of it like this: hybrid activations allow for greater attendance. (And elastic waist bands.)

Those are a few helpful highlights from our fun discussion; listen to the full podcast for more, including our thoughts on specifically when I predict think 250+ attendees at an event will be the new (old) normal.

dB Talent Spotlight

EVENT DESIGN, EVENT INDUSTRY, EVENT PRODUCTION INSPIRATION, EVENT RESOURCES, LIVE EVENTS, TIPS & TRICKS, VIRTUAL EVENTS

Welcome to Decibel Events Talent Spotlight series where we highlight great keynote speakers, presenters, performers and other talent to enhance your in-person or virtual event.

Bookmark this page and be sure to check back each month as we grow this list. It will be a great resource to you the next time you re planning an event.

Dr. Chelsea Jackson Roberts

Dr. Chelsea Jackson Roberts is highly regarded as a leader in a new generation of yogis who are passionate about expanding the visibility of who is commonly seen as Teacher. She is an internationally celebrated scholar and Peloton yoga teacher. 

She has graced the cover of Yoga Journal twice, toured the world as a global yoga ambassador for lululemon, and advocated for local communities as founder of Red Clay Yoga. She is also widely recognized for her work with yoga and teens, and founded Yoga, Literature, and Art Camp at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art. 

She would be a wonderful addition to your next event, and we encourage you to contact her through her website chelsealovesyoga.com.

Michael Brenner

Michael Brenner is a globally-recognized keynote speaker on leadership, culture, and marketing. Author of the bestselling book The Content Formula, Michael s work has been featured by The Economist, The Guardian, and Entrepreneur Magazine. In 2017, Michael was named a Top Business Speaker by The Huffington Post and a Top CMO Influencer by Forbes.

Over the last two decades, Michael has championed a customer-centric approach at organizations large and small. He led sales and marketing for software companies like Nielsen and FullTilt. As an executive at ICR, SAP, and Newscred, Michael s innovative leadership resulted in massive growth. His workshops and keynotes for Fortune 500 brands and tiny startups have inspired profound personal and professional change.

Today, Michael is the CEO of Marketing Insider Group, founded on the belief that strong leaders who champion their teams are the key to unlocking massive growth.

When he s not working with clients, Michael travels the world helping even the most bureaucratic organizations break down silos, create cultures of innovation, and build engaged workforces.

Charlene Li

Need another great keynote speaker for your next virtual or in real life event? Meet Charlene Li.

Charlene Li is an influential thought leader and guide on digital transformation, with a specific focus on customer experience, leadership in the digital era, and the future of work.

For the past two decades, Charlene Li has been helping people see the future. She is an expert on digital transformation, leadership, customer experience and the future of work. Li is the author of six books, including the New York Times bestseller, Open Leadership and co-author of the critically acclaimed book, Groundswell. Her latest book is the bestseller The Disruption Mindset.

She is the Founder and Senior Fellow at Altimeter, an analyst firm acquired in 2015 by Prophet. Named one of the most creative people in business by Fast Company, Charlene is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School.

Fee: $25K $40K
Washington Speakers Bureau, direct and other booking sites.

Eric Stuart

This one s for the event peeps among us. Looking for a great speaker? Meet Eric Stuart.

An ex-British RAF officer and Supervisor in the Metropolitan Police for 17 of his 33 years with firearms, helicopter and covert deployments, he is an excellent motivator and lecturer focused on crowd modeling and safety. We know because we ve attended a two-day course with him and it felt like 5 minutes. He s incredibly interesting, and brings a wealth of experience and stories that will make you see your role as an event professional in a whole new light.

Eric is the owner of Gentian Events Limited, established in 2009 to enhance public safety at events of all shapes and sizes, working at and advising those who deliver them.

Contact him directly at GentianEvents.com

Jennifer Golbeck

Looking for a great keynote speaker? Meet Dr. Jennifer Golbeck.

As a world leader in social media research and communication, Dr. Jennifer Golbeck shares with audiences ways to best leverage and the vast array of social data both in their personal and professional lives.

Dr. Jennifer Golbeck began studying social media from the moment it emerged on the web a decade ago and is one of the world s foremost experts in the field. Her research has influenced industry, government, and the military. She is a pioneer in the field of social data analytics, discovering people s hidden attributes from their online behavior, and a leader in creating human-friendly security and privacy systems.

In addition to her work as a professor at the University of Maryland, she writes for top online news organizations, including Slate and The Atlantic, and appears frequently on NPR and commercial talk radio.

Fee: Under $25,000

https://www.wsb.com/videos/1302

Greg McKeown

As events transition online, more than ever, the challenge to create something that captures and keeps attention is paramount. One of the best way to hold an audience s attention is to have an engaging presenter who can deliver thought-provoking content in a riveting way. So if you re looking for someone who can do that, online, or in person, meet Greg McKeown.

Greg McKeown is a business writer, consultant and researcher specializing in leadership and the tools for success with a focus on living and leading as an essentialist.

Greg McKeown is emerging as one of the most refreshing and transformative business thought leaders and speakers on leadership, productivity and business growth. He is the founder and CEO of THIS Inc. a leadership and strategy design agency in Silicon Valley a New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-selling author, and one of the most popular writers for Harvard Business Review and LinkedIn s Influencer Group.

McKeown has taught at hundreds of events across the world including in the U.S., Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, China, England, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Singapore and South Africa. Organizations, teams, and individuals have benefited from McKeown s innovative perspective, which challenges conventional wisdom and defines how to break through to the next level of success and profitability.

Fee: $25K $40K

A Virtual Abundance of Holiday Cheer

EVERYTHING ELSE, FOOD & CATERING, TIPS & TRICKS, VIRTUAL EVENTS

Dig deep, friends.  

As we rally the last vestiges of 2020, it s important to focus on the valuable life skills we ve unintentionally mastered this year: adaptability, resilience, responsibility and tolerance (and more fucking virtual meetings than we have ever had in our entire lives). Whether it s been free-range children wandering in on Zoom calls, barking dogs overpowering important presentations, or Wi-Fi outages bringing your day to a screeching halt we ve all been there. And somehow, we ve all found unconventional ways to make it work.      

The holidays should be no different. If necessity truly is the mother of invention, then finding ways to share special holiday memories with loved ones amid this year s socially distant reality should be mankind s modern-day Creativity Revolution. Plenty of options still exist for creating holiday moments just as special as those we had when we could simply show up at each other s homes. 

We all started 2020 the same enjoying the novelty of online Happy Hours with family and friends but the freshness of that blue-lit facetime quickly wore out as digital fatigue sunk in. But that doesn t mean we should completely rule out the ripe opportunity that virtual experiences can provide for maintaining vital connections with each other. After all, your face + my face still equals face-to-face (only now with the added benefit of a mute button to silence anyone who gets too far out of line). 

Like everything else in life, a little ingenuity can go a long way to break through the boredom. The winning ingredient for digital socialization is to center your meetup around a specific activity. Get fancy and hire a professional to facilitate an organized evening, or go as simple as creating your own private group on Facebook or Zoom and inviting friends and family to gather online. 

Need a nudge? Here are a few starters:  

1. Curated Cocktail Hour

(Wait, didn t we already establish that going online and drinking got boring months ago?) 

Well, yes, but there are ways around this. We recommend curating an experience. I absolutely love a shared experience where everyone can focus on something you are all doing together. Throw out a quick poll, or suggest a cocktail for everyone. Make it something new and novel, and instruct your attendees to get the ingredients ahead of time. I am a big fan of mise-en-place when I cook, and making craft cocktails is no different. Order the components online, get them all ready, and then the host can give a mixology lesson to the group. At the end of the evening, everyone will have added to their personal repertoire of tried-and-true drink recipes perfect to resurrect when we re all able to gather in person again.

My favorite craft cocktail that I have found this year is a recipe for the Aviation. This is a great pre-prohibition cocktail that deserves some respect. We had the great fun of making this during a cooking class with the team from Truffle Shuffle and being virtually connected with my parents in the audience, as well. I ll go into more detail about them below, but the short version is that they are former French Laundry-trained chefs that have started a virtual cooking class company. Think Michelin-Star Hello Fresh, with a teacher. 

I was able to source MOST of the ingredients for the cocktail locally the lemon, eggs, Maraschino cherry liqueur, gin, etc. but the creme de violette was a special order. Dad to the rescue: he overnighted me a bottle to make this all work. Who doesn t love getting a physical package in the mail these days? It was a bit MacGyver, a bit of Tom Hanks in the opening scene of Castaway, and a whole lot of fun.

Point being, don t just be, take the time and effort to curate the experience.

Here s the recipe:

Ingredients

• 2 ounces gin
• 1/2 ounce maraschino liqueur (Luxardo)
• 1/2 ounce cr me de violette
• 3/4 ounce lemon juice, freshly squeezed
• Splash Simple Syrup
• Garnish: brandied cherry
• Enhancement: One Egg White

Steps

1. Add gin, Luxardo & violette with a splash of simple syrup, lemon juice and egg white.
2. DRY Shake the ingredients (no ice) for 60 seconds
3. Add ice and shake for another 30 seconds
4. Strain over new ice into a rocks glass.
5. Garnish with a brandied cherry.

2.  Dinner Date

On to the team from Truffle Shuffle. If you are looking for a virtual dinner date, consider another curated experience sensing a theme here? This particular business is a couple of chefs that were formerly at the French Laundry, and opened up a Zoom-style, learn-to-prep-and-cook-a-meal mail order business. They are rock solid, have great production value and keep the hour-and-a-half class moving. 

We learned about the Truffle Shuffle team through the Mondavi Sisters. They offered the cooking class with one of their Dark Matter wine pairings. We loved it so much, we booked a second class. This is a great way to connect with customers or friends over the holidays and gives everyone a great story to talk about. It also includes EVERYTHING you need for the meal in one package. 

We re definitely seeing more of these particular cooking-class-style mail order classes out there, so keep your eyes open for new offerings as well as wine pairings to take this to the next level. 

Do your own search for sommelier-led, around-the-world wine tastings like the list Food and Wine recently put out. And if you are a current client of Decibel, look for your Truffle Shuffle invites coming early next year. We like it so much and it s so in my wheelhouse that we are planning to roll this out for some great client connections, as well!

3.  Game Night

Who doesn t love a good game night? If there s anything this year has taught us, it s that the simplest ideas can turn out to be the most fun. This type of virtual get-together provides easy interaction for a diverse group of friends who may not all know each other well, or for family (who may sometimes wish they didn t know each other so well). Grab the box of Trivial Pursuit, Pictionary, Scattergories or Yahtzee, dial into the video call, and let the showdown begin. Multiplayer video games like Call of Duty and Mario Kart can also be shared online, many with chat functionality to smack talk your buddies as if they were sitting right next to you. The last time the family got together to do this, we ended up dueling for hours. I definitely recommend this for an easy impromptu connection that doesn t require heavy pre-planning or coordination.

For a more in-depth adventure, we ve seen in-person team-building activities like Escape Rooms morph into online experiences this year, too. Once again, centered around a shared objective, escape rooms are a different and unique way to gather a group of people and create some excitement and connections (something we re all craving these days). Just like the traditional escape rooms, the collaboration and competition among allies is great fun and the shared victory in the end is a memorable reward in itself.

4.  Gift Exchange

This one may take a little advanced planning, but with the help of a free service like Elfster, you can generate a secret gift exchange and host an across-the-miles unwrapping party with each other. 

Or you can go straight pyramid-scheme. Have you seen the Holiday Bourbon Exchange going around Facebook? By the time you read this, the pyramid should be complete but there may still be time. The basic premise is that a friend of yours tags you on Facebook and offers you to sign up for the Holiday Bourbon Exchange. The rules are that you buy ONE bottle of bourbon for your friend s friend, then put your name on the list and send the instructions to your friends. Bottles of bourbon start appearing at your doorstep. Is it a windfall? Not really I sent my one bottle and (as of this writing) have received about five in return. Not a bad return, but not the three dozen that the letter promises. Why? It s a chain letter pyramid scheme. People drop out, don t continue the trend, are wary (as they should be). It s why pyramid schemes don t work.

Why was this one different? We re all missing the human connection. I jumped on this because it was a fun idea, and thought that at $45, it was worth the buy-in to see what happened. It was worth it to do something nice for someone I didn t know (but was a friend of a friend) and thought I would love to connect with some new people. That worked in spades. It s likely my most commented post on Facebook, I have connected with friends that I have not seen in a long time, and absolutely got $45 in value out of the experience.

Why are we talking about this here? I m not expecting or suggesting you run your own pyramid scheme. But take this as an awesome experiential lesson and a magnifying glass to 2020. Virtual/digital is not enough. Your clients and audience are LONGING for a physical connection. Even more than in years past. Those brands and corporations that figure out a way to crack that barrier will end up out front. Every.single.time.

No matter how distant you may physically feel from friends and family this year, make your 2020 holidays a time for social creativity get inventive, get virtual, and get celebrating. 

Have some ideas of your own? Be sure to share them in the comments below. 

Crowd Dynamics: How to Prevent Crowd Crush Through Proper Planning

Backstage, event design, event industry, event production inspiration, event production technology, everything else, live events, news, tips & tricks

Typically when you notice an old blog post of yours trending, it s a good thing. In this particular case it s actually just devastating. Back in 2015, our team at Decibel posted a blog titled Crowd Dynamics: How to Prevent (and Survive) a Human Stampede or Crowd Crush. At the time, we were reviewing the New Year s Eve stampede in Shanghai, and the Germany Love Parade disaster of 2010 to learn how best to plan for and avoid these types of tragedies at events. With the recent event disaster at Travis Scott s Astroworld concert, this post gained more traction as people searched to find out how something like this could happen. While the documentary and information on this post is still relevant, we thought it important to revise with current information, regulations and best practices.

As many of you know, Houston is my second home. While Decibel did not have a role in the planning or production of Astroworld, we do want to take the opportunity to present key learnings and provide best practices for our clients as they plan their events. What we will not do here is place blame, accusations, or conclusions for this particular event. There will be a time and place for that, but it is too early in the process to have any comment on this particular event before the investigations are complete. However, we firmly believe that no event should lead to an avoidable death or injury if it is planned correctly. So there will be many lessons learned here, and I am sure there were mis-steps along the way that could have telegraphed this in advance. This is avoidable, full stop.

Safety First Mindset

I will start by stating that at any large scale event, there needs to be a safety-first mindset. At Decibel, we are members of the Event Safety Alliance, and we recommend looking into the safety mindset and track record of all vendors and promoters. For crowd management, there is a industry standard protocol for the planning of large scale events. This is covered in the American National Standards Institute document ANSI ES1.9-2020. You can download a sample here, and the entire document will run $40 from ANSI. We HIGHLY recommend reading and following this protocol on your events.

Plan

When producing large scale events, the plan is key. These scenarios must be anticipated, and a plan of action must be in place, in writing. This needs to be agreed by all principal teams onsite as to when this will be executed. In this scenario, the plan causes the action when certain criteria are met, and the human element is minimized in the heat of the moment.

One great example of this is our High Wind Action Plan that we at Decibel have in place for outdoor events. As the wind increases and hits certain speeds, there is a written plan as to what action is automatically triggered. Once we hit the max speed, a full evacuation is in place. There is no real-time conversation or discussion needed. It is pre-determined based on safety and stage tolerances and is set to execute. This saves time, limits discussions, and ultimately leads to lives saved. This scenario can also be in place for crowds as they get energetic, as crowd crushes begin and as the situation reached a danger level.

For crowd specific planning, this document focuses on the DIME-ICE matrix for analyzing risks and managing crowds. This stands for Design, Information, Management, Expectations, Ingress, Circulation, Egress. This is a great explanation of how to asses and plan for crowds. We highly recommend reading and following this matrix as you plan your events.

Sample DIME-ICE matrix during Normal conditions. For illustration purposes only. Your matrix must be based on the circumstances of your event.

Venue Design

Safe venue design is paramount when developing your layout. Through this safety-first mindset, you can do your best to mitigate crowd crush and provide egress for participants. This is as important for outdoor events as it is for indoor events.

This is certainly one of the elements that will be reviewed in the Astroworld venue layout. One way of separating the crowd is through the configuration or design of a T-shape dividing the crowd to stage left and stage right sections. A few other aspects to consider. It is important to avoid 90 degree interior angles, as turns should be rounded- this avoids compressive corners. Also, the more separate corrals or split viewing areas with ingress and egress will help divide the crowd, as well as allow medical and staff to arrive at emergencies as needed. I am sure CADS and layouts will be released in the investigation and I am curious as to how this was initially set up.

Image of Stage Barrier T Shape Design

Communications

Aside from pre-planing and venue design, I really feel that communications are paramount when it comes to safety. At large scale events, cellular coverage can never be relied upon for any emergency. At Decibel, we bring in large amounts of radios for our events, and add repeaters as necessary.

Radios for Communication on Large Scale Event

Teamwork:

Finally, teamwork is important. You can plan, design and communicate to your hearts content, but if all of the teams are not working the same plan, are not working together, all the rest can fall apart. This is one of our strongest attributes at Decibel- we put team above all else and it shows in our productions.

Other Considerations:

Covid and general attitudes are something we are really keeping our eye on as we emerge from this pandemic. After being in lockdown and distanced for two years, the energy of the crowd needs to be taken into account. This will be something to continue to reassess and review as we receive more data. But in addition to the interest of getting back in person, the energy of being around and excited, there is also a wave of aggressive behavior across the board. We are seeing this in the air and at restaurants, at businesses and at town hall and PTA meetings. Decorum has really taken a back seat with some individuals. I do not have a solution here, but it is important to keep an eye on in the coming months as we get back to events.