What the Netball World Cup can teach you about accreditation

Have you thought about event accreditation? The Netball World Cup (NWC) had nearly 100,000 attendees over 10 days, and 1348 staff (732 paid-staff, and 616 volunteers) who all required some form of accreditation.

This article aims to highlight the top 5 reasons why accreditation is so important and why it's worth investing in. 

1. Secure knowledge of people attending your event as staff. Some recent world tragedies at large events have unfortunately brought to the surface just how crucial it is to have strict knowledge of the NWC event staff attending an event: both for the safety of the event attendees and for the protection of our staff in the case of emergencies. Each event staff member had a barcoded check in system, with information on a central system for each access point and a control room on site to be able to manage.

2. Prevention of people using the same name to gain access at multiple points. In a manual check in system, counterfeit tickets can be an issue. Each NWC staff and volunteer member had a barcoded pass and a central system, which determined whether a person had already checked in.

3. Ease of identifying staff at the event. For any number of reasons, sometimes at events it isn’t transparent who is an attendee and who is staff. To ensure that it is only staff gaining access to restricted areas and volunteers aren’t allowed to run free in the event with the other attendees, it is often great to distinguish them with a specific accreditation. The NWC experienced better control and flow of staff versus volunteers verses attendees.

4. Reduction of staff in the incorrect restricted areas. At a sports event like the Netball World Cup, you simply can’t have staff being able to access the changing rooms during game times, or staff wandering through the tunnel where filming of players is taking place. Accreditation made it easy to allow some staff access to some areas and not others.

5. Knowing how many people haven’t checked in. To run the game smoothly and create an enjoyable experience, the NWC could tell at any one time whether people had failed to show up, and search distribution of staff on a central system. This proved invaluable for allocating more team members to busier gates when volunteers were short due to illness or they had not shown up.

These are just five benefits for you when you have a robust accreditation system.

The accreditation system we created was just part of a larger flow system of Rosterfy: the technology for scheduling rosters, creating timesheets, training staff and of course accreditation.