The Event Safety Alliance’s Training Course Saves Money and, Maybe, Lives
by Scott Carroll, EVP & Program Director, Take 1 Insurance
We’re event production specialists, but we’re also human, driven by a complex range of motivations. One of those is the understandable desire to make the best deals we possibly can. (Does that sound like someone else we know?) Psychologists have extensively analyzed our need to feel like we win every situation, from Black Friday sales to negotiating a raise at work. But the best outcomes are the ones where winning also produces a positive outcome for others.
One opportunity for that is through the Event Safety Alliance’s Event Safety Access Training (ESAT) portal, an online entry-level safety awareness training program and competency credential created specifically for those working in a live event or special event environment, which went live last year. Weather-related danger, crowd-control issues, even the increased risk of terrorist activities at and around live events have put a new premium on the kind of knowledge that ESAT brings to those who take this valuable course. It’s designed to heighten individual awareness that safety is a priority and a collaborative endeavor at all live events, but also to begin the cultural conversation about the way event professionals currently regard safety.
What Insurers Look At
Practically, it also provides a verifiable means for demonstrating safety competency, and that’s where event professionals can derive a very real and immediate pecuniary benefit from successfully completing this program: it can translate into a 5- to 15-percent reduction in the cost of general liability insurance. (This benefit is scaled to the percentage of a producer’s or vendor’s workers who are assigned on site that complete the course, thus the discount spread.) It reflects the benefit that the insurance industry views ESAT to be.
Knowledge learned through ESAT is going to help event production professionals do their jobs more effectively and efficiently. That alone has significant potential financial benefits, starting with avoiding problems before they occur, such as by becoming more aware of how local meteorological conditions are changing, and having pre-planned evacuation and crowd-control strategies in place before they’re needed. But these days, a double-digit rate reduction in event liability and general-liability insurance premiums is significant, and can result in significant cost savings. And that’s not just for the event producer but also for every subcontractor and vendor, who now have to pay more attention to their own potential liabilities.
Event-production clients are asking for evidence that their vendors have this kind of training, and state and local laws and regulations impacting event production are increasingly calling for it. So take the Event Safety Alliance’s ESAT course. It’ll help save your companies money, but it will also provide lots of other benefits, too, not the least of which might be saving a life.