As sports and entertainment event schedules fill up, full crowds will return to stadiums. Event venues will need to focus on how to make a strong, efficient, safe, and secure comeback while also following any restrictions and guidelines.
In order to accomplish this, stadiums will need to understand how fans move through their venues both historically and currently. It’s important to understand where congestion forms, how fans move through your venue, and queue length and wait times. These insights help stadium managers optimize staffing, security, safety, and operations as well as deliver a more pleasant experience to fans.
With the Skyfii platform, you can understand how fans move through your stadium and use those insights to improve the fan experience.
The combination of the right technology and effective data analysis can provide these needed insights and help solve these challenges. Data from cameras, WiFi, sales transactions (gathered through PoS integrations), people counters, and mobile apps, can provide stadiums a complete view of the fan from the moment they park until they exit the stadium. Harnessing these data inputs into an intelligent data platform combined with expert analysis can provide a tailored crowd management solution for your venue.
Skyfii’s tailored crowd management solution can help your stadium run as efficiently, safely, and securely as possible which provides a more enjoyable fan experience. Here is how data and analytics can do just that.
Efficiency
From finding their seat to purchasing merchandise or concessions, it’s important fans get where they need to go as efficiently as possible. The analysis of data from various sources including cameras, LiDAR, and WiFi can identify areas of congestion, unauthorized access to areas, busiest times, popular areas, dwell times, heat maps, and fan pathing throughout the stadium. This helps make traffic flow more efficient. This data analysis can also help optimize staffing, security, and operations to meet demand and improve fan experience.
When it comes to queue efficiency, camera or LiDAR data can measure, monitor, and predict queues. Staff can then proactively manage congestion by detecting when queue times cross a threshold and alert staff as to when queues need attention or redirection.
The Skyfii platform can alert staff when queues need attention or redirection.
Another way to keep traffic flow efficient and queue wait times down, is to utilize a data driven communications and marketing platform, like Skyfii’s IO Engage, to provide targeted offers to fans based on their location in your stadium. By providing offers for concessions and merchandise in a fan’s particular location, you eliminate the need for them to gather in areas outside of their section. This helps minimize overcrowding and long queues while increasing fan satisfaction and revenues.
In addition, entry gate turnstile data analysis can help stadium operators understand and predict fan arrival times depending on several factors including weather and type of event. This information is useful for planning purposes to create the most efficient fan experience.
Data analysis can also help stadium managers understand historical attendance levels for specific event categories. This is important information for predicting audience attendance levels so stadium managers can efficiently staff their venue to keep it as safe and secure as possible.
Safety
By ensuring fans have the most efficient journey through your stadium, you also help ensure their safety. Data from cameras, WiFi, BLE, or LiDAR provide visibility on how fans move through your venue in real-time, where queue times are high, and congestion is increased. In the event of a spill or safety incident, the Skyfii platform can detect the nature and location of the incident immediately and notify staff instantaneously. This allows you to deal with the situation as quickly as possible.
You can also utilize mobile apps with communications driven by data within the Skyfii platform to notify fans of safety incidents, queue wait times, reroute them to less crowded areas, or advise fans to wait if congestion is at its peak in key areas. This helps you keep fans safe by regulating crowd circulation and keeping crowds to a minimum.
You can harness data to help optimize your staff as well. Data analysis can provide a ratio of staff to fans and the impact staff ratios have on queue times, congestion, and more. Staff can also receive automated notifications to optimize cleaning cycle frequencies based on increased or decreased fan volumes. When you have the right amount of staff to aid with crowd control and cleaning, your stadium is safer for your fans.
You can visualize the ratio of staff to fans, and analyze the impact staff ratios have on queue times, congestion, and more.
It’s also important to consider the accessibility level of your fans to best ensure their safety. Camera or LiDAR data can detect the behavioral patterns of fans based on classifications such as a person walking or wheelchair moving. This data can help stadiums understand the most efficient paths for wheelchair users so stadium operators can plan safer and more efficient accessibility routes and services.
Security
Stadiums are complex venues with lots of different rooms and areas with varying levels of security. It’s important to have a crowd management solution that can help you direct people where to go, detect when people are in areas they shouldn’t be, and quickly respond to or prevent incidents.
Data from cameras, WiFi, BLE, or LiDAR help you monitor all areas in real-time and send alerts to staff when unauthorized persons are in secure areas. When a security breach or incident does occur, you will know what happened and where immediately. This allows you to send security personnel to the location as quickly as possible. The analysis of surge patterns can also help you detect the potential for or beginnings of an incident before it occurs. This allows you to alert security closest to the impacted location to deescalate or respond.
Within the Skyfii platform, detect the potential for or beginnings of an incident before it occurs and alert security closest to the impacted location to deescalate or respond.
In addition, these data insights can help you develop operational crowd management plans for evacuations and emergency situations. You can refine and develop tactics based on historical data to ensure fans are protected as much as possible.
Do you need a crowd management solution?
An effective crowd management solution takes into account every aspect of your unique venue so you can provide an efficient, safe, and secure experience for fans.
At Skyfii, we provide fan measurement data and insights that you need to make better decisions at your stadium. We help you understand what is happening to your entire fan population in real-time so you can act decisively to increase efficiency while improving the fan experience. Over time, this data accumulates and can provide reliable evidence for planning, maintenance management, and investment decisions.
Interested in learning more? Check out our blog on the various use cases we enable in the stadium vertical and request a demo of our platform.