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Credentialing and Accreditation Explained: Simplifying & Controlling Chaos

Published January 9, 2019 | Category: Services

So, what do you do for a living?  The ongoing quest for a proper elevator pitch.

What do you do for a living? This question typically causes us to pause and debate the best way to respond…the ongoing quest for a proper elevator pitch. 

How do we explain that Sports Systems partners with events across the world to help them simplify and control their chaos?  That would be the easiest, most straightforward answer to give. And we’ve tried it. But people’s reactions indicate they think it’s a made-up job, a fabrication of words that sounds important, but doesn’t actually contribute anything impactful. But in actuality, this is as far from the truth as it gets!

So, let’s try again. To put it as simply as possible, we help make sure that every single person working within the boundaries of an event can get where they need to be and not get where they don’t need to be. This is no small task when you consider the size of the events our partners produce. Ponder this for a moment – Levi’s Stadium hosted over 74,000 fans who watched the Clemson Tigers defeat the Alabama Crimson Tide in the 2019 College Football Championship. How many people do you think it takes to produce an event of that scale? Five hundred? A thousand? Actually, multiply that a few times and that’s how many people were inside Levi’s Stadium working on game day.

Every person has a job to do and a purpose for going where they need to go. But especially in this day of increased security, it is necessary to tightly manage the access points to ensure that people are only going where they truly have a purpose. Try to imagine the scenario if access points weren’t tightly managed. How would a broadcast cameraman do his job if suddenly there were an extra thousand people on the sidelines getting in the way? Or if every marketing partner decided they wanted to watch the game from the press box? Or worse – if every fan in the building was able to find their way into their favorite team’s locker room? It would be complete and utter chaos – to say the least!

There are so many important staff, media, sponsorship partners, third-party vendors, and other stakeholders that come and go, playing a vital role in the production of a live event. Just like a traffic light, accreditation and credentialing allow all stakeholders to come and go, moving harmoniously and working efficiently.

This is where Sports Systems’ Accreditation and Credentialing, and our team come in. We provide that critical traffic light.

The precisely correct, easily-identifiable credential needs to end up in the hands of each one of those thousands of people working the event. And sure, there are homespun solutions that purport to do this. But there comes a point where the number of people applying for access, the volume of data collected, the range of access points assigned, the level of security needed, and the number of tangible credentials produced surpass what an internal or less robust solution can handle. (To say nothing of the additional need to be GDPR compliant.)

We help build and manage an online accreditation/credentialing solution that is tailored to a specific event, a specific facility or a season or series of events. Within this solution, a credential request can be submitted, reviewed, processed, produced and tracked from a single, secure environment.  

Now – imagine you were someone who had no experience with accreditation or credentialing and we tried to quickly explain all the above to you. Your eyes would have glazed over in about 2.5 seconds. So, for the time being, we’ll keep trying to find the perfect elevator pitch that lands somewhere between losing someone’s attention in 2.5 seconds and saying that we have the secret power to control chaos.

Contact Brian Binette @Brian.Binette@SportsSystems.com or +1 201-585-9289 if you need any help with simplifying the chaos of YOUR event.