When people talk about access control at an event, three key words come to mind straight away: speed, simplicity and reliability. Anyone who organises events knows that every dead moment is a risk to the event’s performance and to the final rating of the experience people will live through and go on to describe.
Making sure the moment of entering the event venue is frictionless, fast, secure and pleasant therefore becomes a decisive factor in how much people enjoy it (or, conversely, in how frustrated they get) and has to be treated as such. The same holds for training sessions, workshops, seminars, entry to the exhibition area and to individual stands, appointments with companies and social activities such as networking sessions, drinks and dinners: in all of them the moments of entry — and where necessary of exit — are an integral part of the overall quality.
To all of which two further factors have to be added.
The first, alas, is financial: the resources available keep shrinking while the quality standards the sector demands — the second factor — keep rising, helped along by ever fiercer competition and by the experience attendees have accumulated, which makes them more knowledgeable and more demanding
In a landscape like that, access control comes under considerable pressure, dense with opportunity and with risk alike. Which is why thinking hard about tools such as access control apps is anything but trivial.
Let us look at a few of them.
1. Speed + practicality = mobility
We have seen it already: nobody likes queuing. Or rather, nobody likes wasting time waiting for something to happen. As organisers, that faces us with the need to make checking in and out of venues as fast as possible and as interactive as possible, since people who are doing something get less bored than people doing nothing. But how do you hold those two things together?
First of all by removing the pointless barriers, starting with the biggest ones: entrances and exits. It sounds mad, but it is not, because the concepts of entrance and exit often live more in our heads and our habits than anywhere else. Not always, obviously, but often. And wherever their fixity is not necessary, you can create alternative routes where people are active and also find smaller crowds, so they spend less time queuing and “wasting time”. Fine — but how do you reconcile that magnificent freedom with controlling access? “Simply” by dematerialising it, making it more mobile and therefore more agile.
In practice, by removing all the unnecessary structures such as turnstiles, barriers and desks and bringing in flexible ones such as tablets and smartphones, through which you can achieve the same result — correctly recording entry, whether single or multiple, booked or not — without the rigidity (and often the cost) of structures that force people down set routes and stiffen up their actions.
Just think of everything that opens up for outdoor events, which many of you will certainly have in mind as the good weather approaches.
2. From control to management: agile booking raises both quality and quantity
Another point of rigidity that often shows up at events — particularly large ones or those with an elaborate structure — has to do with activities that require booking.
To take part in these sessions people are often asked to reserve their place well before the event. While that procedure helps with running the activities — it lets you book the spaces best suited in layout and capacity, reducing waste, and lets you plan more efficiently and effectively — it sometimes produces inefficiencies too. Think of the two opposite cases: people book and then do not show up or, conversely, do not book until it is too late, losing valuable opportunities both for themselves and for the event.
In at least some cases these problems could be solved with an access control system flexible enough to double as a tool for managing bookings and for recording and validating them, through a real-time link to the event management platform. That way you could not only manage space and time more efficiently, but also give people an additional service, relieving them of the burden of planning their lives well in advance even where doing so causes stress or difficulty.
The result? Easy to see with the naked eye: satisfaction with a system that works, answers a need and makes life simpler. Who would not want that?
3. Privacy and data security: mobility's Achilles heel
Talking about tearing down barriers and simplifying routes — all things that could increase the efficiency, effectiveness and enjoyment of events — we would be naive, indeed downright reckless, not to bear in mind that all of it, like any coin, has two sides.
Talking about access control means talking about personal data and, still more, about exchanging and processing it. More broadly, it means talking about everything covered by a set of initials we have all become fairly familiar with: GDPR. The more decentralised the process becomes and the more people can reach this data, the more essential it is that every node of that widened network is protected exactly as the centre is. And that all of it is held within a coherent system that protects without weighing down and complicating life for whoever has to use it. Fine — but in practice? Let us say that if we picture N colleagues in the field, all equipped with a smartphone or tablet for controlling access to the event and its various areas, we have to make sure those devices are not only reliable in performance but also secure, that they protect both parties (the attendee and the person checking access) with regard to the data that is viewed, exchanged and stored, so that it is only what is needed and not one item more, and that services are delivered promptly and securely while the privacy of both parties is protected. That is why it becomes essential that not only the tools but also the infrastructure connecting them is designed and built around the principles of reliability, security, GDPR compliance and integration.
So, having got this far: access control by app, yes or no?
For us, decidedly yes — provided the tool performs well, is secure and can adapt to the needs of each individual experience, and provided it is used carefully and after proper assessment.
Which is why you can see ours in action: request a live demo and find out whether it might be the right one for your next event.