Ever found yourself lost in the crowds of an oversold festival, searching in vain for the loo, only to realise after waiting for what seemed like an eternity you’d joined the wrong queue?
All these are the nightmarish scenarios that event organisers dedicate themselves to avoiding by looking for how to control the crowd. How do you make this happen for your events? This is how the pros do it.
1. Start with the Layout
The foundation of managing visitor flow is understanding the event layout. You could consider it the same as urban planning. Gates, food stalls, first aid tents, and exits need to be charted out well in advance, with the path for people taking priority.
Have a clear line of sight for everyone and station staff at bottleneck points. Do not force everyone to go through one bottleneck. Stick up brightly-coloured high-visual signage for the revellers who can barely remember their names.
For example, with rain on the way and a big headliner due, Glastonbury and other big UK festivals sometimes operate one-way walking routes for people to move easily and not cause chaos. This is not about restriction but about rhythm and safety.
2. Segment to Simplify
If you have a big crowd, the best way to manage it without feeling completely overwhelmed is by breaking guests into smaller groups. Colour-coded wristbands or radio-frequency-enabled wristbands from a site like Europaband are great for doing just that. Wristbands look good, but they also make a great way to separate access levels, time slots or anything else you can think of. Want to give your VIPS a separate entrance? Give them a wristband.
Want to make sure people who need disabled access can get to the front of the queue? Give them a wristband. Colour cuffs are great for making an easy visual sweep of who should be where (useful for the security team). If you want to take it up a notch, RFID wristbands are a must.
You can track your guests in real time, see where they are moving to and hanging out and set up cashless payment points. You’ll know where each of your event-goers is and can monitor everything without lifting a finger.
3. Use Timing to Your Advantage
Even when your visitors are segmented, not everyone has to come all at once. Spread out your arrivals. Offer your guests an incentive to show up early or even out your crowd peaks by breaking your audience into different showtimes.
With a good ticketing platform, you can organise staggered queues without long waiting times or bottlenecks. Better still, when they check in with an RFID wristband, no one needs to wait around for an hour anymore.
4. Train Your Team Like It’s Game Day
A plan is only good if the right people are there to put it in motion. You need your on-the-ground team to see the potential for problems. Your staff and volunteers are the eyes and ears of everything, so give them the training they need to keep things moving.
Rehearsal is proof of concept. Work through what’s supposed to happen by actually making it happen. Walk them through the space, show them how everything fits together and give them the confidence they need to make sure everything goes well and to de-escalate situations it doesn’t.
5. Signage and Sound Matter
You may have a rock-solid plan in place but it’s only as good as the people that know about it. Your messaging needs to be clear and there’s not a more powerful way to do that than with signage. Audio messaging is even better. Auditory signals are the best way to alert people in high-volume areas like a food court or a bottlenecked exit gate.
It’s not just volume but the tone as well. Keeping things calm, especially in an emergency, can be the difference between simple frustration and full-on panic. So keep the sound down and the message clear.
6. Create Escape Routes
No one likes feeling trapped, so create escape routes and make sure everyone knows about them. When the show is over and the headliner steps off the stage, you will be glad there’s more than one exit. Also, create quiet corners where people can take a break from the hustle and bustle. If they feel comfortable, they don’t tend to stampede.
7. Let the Wristbands Do the Heavy Lifting
Directing human traffic is all well and good, but with the right wristbands, you won’t need half a dozen volunteers. Whether you need something tamper-proof, waterproof or impervious to line-cutters, you will find what you need from the right source.
Organisers in the UK and across the continent have been using these bands to help them manage events, from marathons to concerts. If you’re serious about flow, it’s a small investment that will solve your problems of crowd control.
Flow Is a Feeling
At the end of the day, having a successful event isn’t just about managing the crowd — it’s also about the experience. If people are free to move and comfortable with the flow, they will have a great time. So don’t think of festivals as work. Think of them as enjoyable events and get with the flow.
