Festival Consulting – Flying Colours Events

Flying Colours Events’ event management and business disciplines enhance your customers experience, nurture your event’s unique character and increase your management control.

Clarifying Event Objectives

Well-conceived, clearly-defined, measurable objectives lead to better event outcomes-yet many events are operated without them.

Flying Colours Events can help facilitate you, your organising committees and stakeholder groups to develop agreed event objectives that will be used to guide the development of the event, and to measure the events performance.

Objectives can be expressed in a variety of forms including financial, educational, branding, communication and experience-based outcomes measurable in a manner appropriate to your event and community.

Event Performance Measurement

Clearly defined, measurable event objectives allow us to track and report on event performance in the lead-up, operation and post event timeframes.

Tracking allows for early intervention adjustments rather than late time-frame nasty surprises.

Measurement and reporting helps to analyse which parts of the budget, and which parts of the programme most effectively contribute to the event outcomes – and therefore which parts of the programme should be expanded, improved or addressed.

Performance measures can also link directly to costed improvement recommendations to determine and track a realistic return on investment for specific improvement initiatives.

Mentoring

We can mentor your staff in a variety of roles, in a custom designed format that works for all parties.
For many events, the open plan office environment where “apprenticeships” happened informally, are gone. Bring You Own Device, work from home style event teams save on centralised rent and equipment costs, but they do incur costs in other areas that are less measurable. Working independently, staff sometimes don’t know what they don’t know, and there aren’t others around who have found out (the hard way?) what works.

You may have staff with all the right stuff but are possibly a little inexperienced. Or who have strong skills in some areas, but need support in others. (For example, staff with excellent interpersonal skills, who struggle with the complex data management required to create and accurately manages rosters, artist information, schedules etc.
We can work face to face, by phone, or Skype, in short or long term Mentoring programs.

Project Management and Facilitation

Flying Colours Events take on a project management role to coordinate the various stakeholders and internal and external service providers involved in achieving your event objectives.

It can take a focussed external party with the necessary skills, attitudes and approaches to bring together a group of people, draw out their best contributions and achieve the best possible outcome.

Flying Colours Events can provide you with the right person to bring your event together to clarify and achieve your goals.

Budget Planning and Management

Flying Colours Events has the skills and experience to help you create a simple, realistic budget to achieve your event objectives. We help introduce good budget management and administration practice to ensure the event stays financially on track.

We help to implement appropriate expenditure authorisation and tracking processes to ensure the budget stays on track and that changes and variations are thought through, managed and authorised.

Accreditation Review

Flying Colours Events can manage the design and implementation of who has access to which parts of the event and when. A clear plan of what access is required by which people, and the processes (including exception management) distribution and communication required to implement it.

Ticketing Solutions

Flying Colours Events can review the ticketing pricing and distribution methods used.

Events Materials Production

Flying Colours Events can help you to put together materials required to communicate with patrons and sponsors. Posters, banners, flyers, stickers and internet presence can all be coordinated through the various stages of contribution, editing, authorisation, design and production.

Post event review

Flying Colours Events can help to make sure that the maximum value is gained from the knowledge and experience of the staff involved in your event.

Useful feedback can be gained from everyone involved in the event from subcontractors, staff and volunteers through to sponsors and other stakeholders.

Facilitation of feedback from these groups can be key to ensuring future events continue to improve on the current benchmark.

Consumer Experience

Flying Colours Events can anonymously review the event from the patron’s perspective (a mystery shopper approach). This includes pre-event ticketing and communication, the event experience, vendor behaviour, crowd control, customer service, handling of traffic issues, and meeting of a wide variety of other customer expectations.

Health and Safety

Flying Colours Events helps identify what is possible beyond the simple provision of first aid kits and fire extinguishers.

Event health and safety is as much about minimising the impact of an incident as it is about removing potential risks in the first place.

Prompt, planned action by trained and responsible event staff can help ensure a minor incident does not develop into a more serious situation.

Responsible Service of Alcohol

Flying Colours Events can help in the training and supervision of alcohol sales to ensure your event stays well inside the regulations for Responsible Service of Alcohol (RSA) and liquor licensing.

Well-managed RSA can have a major effect on the overall atmosphere of an event. Intelligent and friendly control of alcohol consumption is one of the best ways of ensuring that your event stays relaxed and happy and sends its patrons home at the end of the festival safely and in a healthy frame of mind.

RSA management is a significant factor in minimising OHandS incidents, lowering event risk and maintaining the strong community support vital for the ongoing success of your event.

Website content, structure and functionality

Flying Colours Events can help facilitate the requirements, content and implementation of highly professional and highly functional websites to support your event.

Includes online presentation, liaison with sponsors for inclusion of advertising and promotional material, and all the other facets of events materials production.

Risk management

A structured approach to event management includes risk management at a variety of levels including – planning, management and financial risks, event day operational risks, and ongoing operational risks for annual or regular events.

Volunteer Management

Flying Colours Events provides training and management on the effective use of Volunteers within the festival environment and can provide hands on volunteer facilitation services.

Volunteers can be amongst the greatest proponents for your event. They should be expertly managed to optimise productivity and guide their own positive experience of the event.

Well managed volunteers integrated into the overall event will display low absenteeism and low turn-over year to year. They can be a critical component of your successful festival team.

Staffing Solutions

Flying Colours Events can help to ensure you have the right number of appropriate staff at the right place at the right time.

Recruitment, selection and training practices ensure you have the right skills and attitudes present in your event workforce.

This includes;
a) rostering to minimise labour costs, and ensure adequate staffing levels at peak times,
b) procedures for redeploying staff during an event,
c) ensure reasonable work hours to reduce burnout and OHandS risks,
d) motivation, team leadership skills, train the trainer and development of staff as event ambassadors, and
e) tracking of staff performance from one event to the next.

Good planning, rostering and management systems helps to ensure that all staff receive the right pay promptly and with minimum administrative effort to ensure that they continue to be happy to work for you again in the future.

Cash Management

Flying Colours Events can help implement systems that reduce the incidence of cash handling errors, incidence of running out of change, or deliberate fraud, track cash movement and track cash against sales.

Events are chaotic environments, and robust systems are required to ensure that staff are clearly accountable for cash handling.

Good cash handling practices extend beyond the cashier to planned and defined processes for skimming, reconciliations, accounting, banking and transport.

Operational Systems

Flying Colours Events can help ensure your operational systems are structured and effective to produce a smoothly running well managed event.