When you are planning for an inspiring event, you probably don’t want to imagine the possibility of your hard work going to waste, but the pandemic illustrated why it’s important to prepare for the chance that your meeting may need to be canceled due to circumstances completely outside your control. Here are some vital event insurance tips.
Planning for the What Ifs
Whether you’re planning an in-person or online event, it’s important to have a contingency plan in place.
What if your event can’t go ahead as planned? A new wave of the pandemic variant might trigger lockdowns in your area, banning in-person events. Or maybe new regulations will be triggered, requiring you to rearrange how your event works because a hall that should seat 200 people will only seat 50 with appropriate social distancing.
Even virtual events could be subject to disruption. You might have booked a speaker, for instance, only for them to have a family crisis that means they’re unavailable. Plus, there’s a good chance that somebody—whether that’s you, speakers, or attendees—will have technical issues of some sort on the day.
Insurance Must-Haves
Event cancellation insurance can give you much-needed peace of mind. The last thing you want is to be lying awake the night before worrying about the financial hit to your company if the event has to be canceled. There are lots of options for events cancellation insurance out there, so shop around to find something that suits your needs.
Make sure that the policy you purchase will cover cancellations due to Covid-19. Many policies don’t cover event organizers in the event of a cancellation due to a communicable disease.
You should also look for (reliable) online testimonials. While companies will, inevitably, use their most favorable reviews on their own website, you can try third-party websites to see what customers are saying. You may also want to look at what customers are saying on Twitter or other social media sites.
Less obvious, but still critical, look for a company with a strong online presence, through their website, blog, and/or social media accounts. A solid online presence is a good sign that the company is established and reputable, and easy to contact if you have any issues. You may also want to see how responsive the insurance company appears to be to questions on Twitter, Facebook, or even in blog comments.
What to Include in Your Insurance Policy: Key Tips
When you’re choosing an insurance policy, you’ll want to look out for:
- How much the deductible is compared to the premium? Remember, your company will need to pay the deductible before the insurance company pays any other costs. You may think it’s best to opt for a low deductible (e.g. $1,000) rather than a higher one (e.g. $5,000) … but your premiums might be significantly lower with the higher deductible, so it is a balancing act.
- What types of insurance are included in the policy? You may just want event cancellation insurance, or you may want to get several types of insurance to cover things like your liability if someone is injured at an event.
- What exactly is covered by the policy? For instance, it’s common for labor disputes to be excluded along with adverse weather events. You’re also very unlikely to be covered if you choose to cancel the event because of low ticket sales.
Preparing for the Next Crisis
Businesses all over the world have been hugely disrupted by Covid-19. Some have thrived, others have adapted and some have sadly failed due to the pressures caused by the crisis.
While we don’t know how the Covid-19 pandemic will end or quite what the world will look like in 2022 and beyond, one thing is for certain: at some point, your business is going to face another crisis. It could be something as simple as a new competitor in your area or a PR disaster for your company. But it’s important to be prepared.
Some key things you can do now include:
- Go digital. Chances are, your company has already ended up making huge strides in this area. Perhaps employees have been working from home for the first time in 2020-21 and much more communication is taking place electronically. Maybe you’ve moved from physical servers to cloud servers. The more you can do to make your operations digital, the better.
- Pay attention to cybersecurity. With sensitive business information and customer data increasingly being stored in the cloud, it’s more important than ever to have robust security measures in place. Strengthen your security now—otherwise, the next crisis you face could be a data breach that exposes customers’ private data, netting your business a huge fine coupled with a loss of customer confidence.
- Have cash reserves in place. If a crisis meant that you couldn’t provide your product or service for a month, what would happen? For some companies, this would be ruinous, as they don’t have anything in reserve. If you know you’d struggle to make payroll if things went badly, then it’s time to cut costs and make sure you have cash in the bank to cover your company’s running expenses for at least a couple of months.
While you may not be able to predict exactly when the next crisis will happen or what form it will take, making sure your company is as resilient as possible will help you navigate it with ease. Instead of desperately struggling to survive, you’ll be in a great position to adapt to the new circumstances so your company can continue to thrive.
Rupert Jones is a financial independence geek who strongly believes in the power of networking. He spends his time helping people leverage secrets of financial wealth and process to achieve financial freedom.
