Ensuring the wellbeing of event attendees has always been paramount, but today, we’re seeing an increasing need for better event safety. While 75% of meeting professionals view risk and compliance as very or extremely important in 2025, only 46% say their meeting policies include event safety and security processes.
Of course, formulating an event safety plan takes more than the right policy language—it requires event technology that ensures your strategy is practicable and effective.
Using the event security checklist below as a guide, let’s dig into how you can organize safe events with the help of event management software, onsite solutions, and event management best practices.
1. Consider event safety when selecting your venue and destination
Event safety must be built into your plan from the very beginning. This means that as you’re evaluating destinations and venues based on estimated audience size, demographics, and event programming, your event security plan should remain top of mind.
For instance, if you’re set on a particular destination but have concerns about safety in certain areas, narrow your venue search to include only areas that appear safest for travelers. You can also use venue sourcing tools to find venues that offer free airport shuttle services or are close to major train or bus stations to ensure you’re doing your best to keep attendees safe while they travel.
If you know you want physical security at your event, consider adding onsite security to your event venue checklist as you’re comparing venues.
Once it’s time to conduct site visits, keep these safety considerations in mind:
- Venue access: Is there sufficient access to your venue, and can all entrances and exits be monitored by onsite security or cameras? Will the space be accessible to those who are not attending your event?
- Venue inclusivity: Different attendees may have different safety needs, including those with disabilities, language barriers, or sensory sensitivities. Ensure your venue is ADA-compliant, offers quiet zones or safe spaces, and has clear signage and directions in multiple languages.
- Capacity and crowd management: Can each event space comfortably accommodate your estimated number of attendees without the risk of overcrowding? Where are the emergency exits in relationship to spaces where you’ll draw the largest crowds? Consider where you might need to implement more robust crowd management strategies.
- Commuter safety: If you’ve chosen a venue based on its proximity to public transportation, how safe will attendees be as they “commute?” Does it appear safe for them to walk from your venue to the nearest train station or their hotel? Is there secure parking onsite for attendees who drive?
- Evacuation planning: Your venue should have an evacuation plan in place in case of emergency, but it’s up to you to evaluate whether that plan includes everything necessary to manage risks during your event. For instance, if your event includes a concert with a popular headliner, does your venue’s evacuation plan include what to do in the event of a crowd surge?
- Onsite medical preparedness: Medical incidents are among the most common emergencies at in-person events, but there are several things planners can do to stay in control of these situations, including ensuring there are:
- Trained medical professionals or EMTs on site
- First aid stations set up at the venue
- Emergency response contacts listed in all staff materials
- Emergency response plans and POCs in place for different scenarios
- Weather preparedness: Both indoor and outdoor events can be impacted by weather, and this risk is heightened due to climate unpredictability. Safety issues related to weather can be as commonplace as heat stroke or as severe as tornadoes. To plan for every contingency, consider alternate ways of hosting an outdoor event (tents, alternate indoor locations), track weather forecasts carefully, create protocols for cancelling or evacuating your event, and clearly communicate these protocols to your onsite staff.
Top tip: Use event design software to design room layouts based on capacity limits and safe exit strategies.
2. Assess the risks of controversy at your event
Particularly as geopolitical issues weigh heavily on everyone’s minds, organizing an event comes with the added complexity of tracking public sentiment and calculating possible risks. For instance, with political divisions and state and local laws spurring regional boycotts, you might face pushback for choosing a destination your attendees, speakers, or sponsors oppose.
What’s more, if your event topics, speakers, or sponsors are at all controversial, you could experience criticism from residents at your destination or even your own attendees. As you make decisions about your event location, speakers, and themes, consider which elements might be considered controversial, where your event might be open to greater risk, and how you can manage that risk accordingly.
Here are just a few ways you can manage risks related to your event programming:
- Manage speakers’ session content: With the help of speaker management software, you can evaluate speaker abstracts as they are submitted and keep an eye out for problematic topics. Once you’ve chosen your speakers, you can track their progress as they create session content and make sure nothing controversial is included in their content.
- Monitor high-profile or high-risk speakers: If you’ve invited a speaker whose public image or company is controversial, use your event platform to keep track of their schedule so you know where they should be at all times.
- Track attendee feedback: If you’re concerned about how a speaker or content track will be received by attendees, you can track attendee feedback using post-session surveys to capture any dangerous or suspicious responses.
Strategies to monitor risk at larger events
If you’re hosting a large event that might be more open to threats due to its scale, subject matter, speakers, or otherwise, consider how you might monitor threats more closely before and during your event.
Giving attendees access to an anonymous incident reporting tool or hotline can help you gain visibility into incidents or safety concerns that you or your staff might miss, whether they be suspicious activity or a blocked emergency exit.
If your event is getting a lot of online buzz, it’s possible there’s some negative attention mixed in that you should be aware of. Proactive threat monitoring via social listening tools is a great way to keep the pulse of public sentiment surrounding your event and monitor any possible threats before and during the event.
3. Ensure a secure event registration experience
A secure event registration platform is vital for protecting sensitive attendee information, such as contact details, demographics, and payment details. Your event platform must offer secure payment gateways to ensure attendees’ data security and prevent fraud.
Beyond offering a secure registration experience for attendees, you should also consider how you can use the registration process to make your event more secure by monitoring or limiting registrations.
For instance, if there are former attendees who are banned from your events, make sure your event registration software allows you to prevent them from registering. Set up registration approvals so you have control over which registrants are approved or denied.
Registration is also an optimal time to collect detailed contact information for each attendee so you can communicate quickly in the event of an emergency. If possible, collect multiple contact options as well as an emergency contact for each attendee.
4. Adhere to data security and privacy standards
Ensuring the security of all attendee data, not just registration and payment information, is crucial. As attendees interact with your event platform, they’ll be adding details to their profiles, including email addresses, phone numbers, session attendance, food preferences, and more.
Event organizers must use a secure platform to store and manage all of this data and comply with data protection regulations such as GDPR and CCPA to protect attendees’ privacy.
To help ensure the security of attendees’ profiles, implement single-use, multi-factor authentication for login. Want to take it a step further for your internal events? Offer a single sign-on (SSO) option for employees to seamlessly access your events using your organization’s credentials.
5. Verify attendee credentials during check-in
Advanced event check-in software, including QR codes and mobile check-in, streamline the check-in process while enhancing security. By implementing mandatory photo collection during registration or prior to check-in, you can add a layer of security to visually verify that only authorized, registered attendees can gain access to your event.
This process can also prevent “credential passing” by ensuring each badge only allows one entry for an attendee who has verified their identity.
6. Control access with enhanced ID badge security
From the moment attendees check in at your event and verify their identity, their badges can offer significant benefits for controlling access throughout the entirety of the event. With on-demand badge printing, you can:
- Verify identities at check-in points: Print badges with attendee profile photos and QR codes for easier identify verification at the time of check-in and for access to limited-capacity sessions or VIP spaces.
- Prevent fraud: Print badges with unique markings to prevent fraudulent entry into your event.
- Deactivate lost badges: If an attendee loses their badge, ensure it cannot be used by anyone else by deactivating the lost badge and printing a new, secure badge.
- Alert staff to unauthorized access: If there are secure spaces or restricted areas at your venue, you can ensure unauthorized attendees cannot access these spaces and automatically alert staff when attendees attempt to scan their badges at these entry points.
- Track attendees’ movements: Using passive RFID technology, you can monitor attendee movements in real-time, documenting an attendee’s entire journey throughout your event down to their last-seen location. This is particularly useful if you have an urgent need to find an attendee or group of attendees.
- Monitor crowds: Particularly for larger events, crowd monitoring is a critical piece of event security. Use attendees’ badges to track movements at the group or individual level to monitor room occupancy where space is limited, track where the largest number of attendees are located at any time, and ensure you’re prepared to respond to emergencies in high-occupancy spaces.
7. Quickly communicate with attendees, staff, and security
Effective communication channels are critical in emergencies and for alerting security to any concerns. Your event website and mobile app can be updated in real-time to notify attendees in the case of an emergency, and you can generate and send targeted communications based on session attendance, location, or attendee type.
What’s more, consider setting up discrete SMS alerts for staff and security to communicate important updates, such as when VIPs or persons of interest have checked in at your event or accessed a particular session or space. Customize these alerts based on titles, names, and registration types.
Train staff on safety protocols
Even the best safety plan falls apart if the people executing it don’t know what to do or how best to communicate. All staff, including your own team, venue staff, and outside vendors, should be trained on all safety protocols.
Training should include:
- How to handle disruptions, lost badges, suspicious activity, medical incidents, weather events, etc.
- A breakdown of where all emergency exits, first aid kits/stations, and panic buttons are
- An emergency contact flow chart, including best POCs for each emergency scenario, whether they be yourself, head of venue security, 911, or otherwise
Build inclusivity into your communication strategy
Just as different attendees have different safety needs, they’ll also have different ways of communicating, and you’ll need to account for everyone in your emergency communication plan.
To ensure all attendees are safe throughout your event, begin by creating safety materials in different formats (text, visual, audio) so that all emergency information is accessible to everyone. You should also have a clear plan in place for attendees with disabilities or communication limitations so that you can communicate with them as quickly and effectively as any other attendee.
What’s more, your staff should be well trained on your communication strategies as well as how to assist attendees with additional needs throughout your event and in an emergency.
Top tip: Using one event platform as your single source of truth for all of your meetings and events allows you to react and communicate swiftly in an emergency. Particularly if you’re running multiple events at once or host many events at a particular location, you can identify all affected events, update each event website and app as needed, and communicate with attendees and staff—all in one place.
8. Conduct post-event security analysis
When an event wraps, the work is far from over. Analyzing security measures post-event is crucial for understanding where there might have been security gaps and whether changes must be made for your next event.
Conduct post-event surveys to gather feedback from attendees, especially regarding controversial speakers or security concerns. This feedback can provide valuable insights for future events. You can also survey your staff and security to identify concerns and areas of improvement.
Take a data-driven approach to your future event planning by generating post-event reports to evaluate the effectiveness of your security measures. Include details such as number of attendees, session attendance rates, attendee feedback from controversial sessions, attempts to access secure spaces, and more.
Consider event safety throughout your entire event strategy
They key to an effective event safety plan is to incorporate security protocols and safety features into your event strategy from the very beginning. From the moment you begin choosing session topics to when your event wraps, there are plenty of opportunities to enhance attendee safety with the help of event tech.
