Consulting Example: Event Management Strategy
Event Management Strategy
- The District of Columbia hosts all the presidential inaugurations, which typically attract crowds of a few hundred thousand attendees.
- The January 2009 inauguration of President Obama was a record-breaker, with a crowd of 1.8 million in attendance.
- In addition, that event attracted a record number of charter buses - 3000+ - with each carrying about 50 passengers.
- Because the ridership on Metrorail subway system was also at a record over-capacity, it could not handle the 150,000+ passengers coming in on these buses, so parking remotely and riding Metro in was not an option.
- To get the bus passengers to the site of the event, we had to arrange to turn many square miles of downtown street parking into temporary bus parking lots that were within walking distance to the events.
- To make that strategy work, we had to deploy the DC National Guard to shut down the streets and recruit numerous volunteers to guide the buses and their passengers.
- The strategy worked, as none of the 3000+ buses had to be turned away and none of the 150,000 passengers were lost or stranded. Without this strategy, many of these buses full of people would have been turned away before even reaching the city after traveling hundreds of miles to see the event.
