VolunteerLocal is thrilled to announce a new partnership with Blerter, a tool that helps outdoor events streamline delivery, prepare for things that can go wrong and increase crew engagement. With a simple, easy-to-use platform that helps centralize your communications, operations and safety processes – your entire event team is connected in one place.
We had the pleasure of chatting with Anthony Vernon, Head of Sales at Blerter about what they do, their partnership with VolunteerLocal, and how he sees the future for the events industry.
How do you describe Blerter to someone who’s never heard of it before?
Blerter is an event delivery platform that connects your entire event crew on one unified platform to centralise communication, manage risk and streamline operational delivery. It leverages the latest digital technology to provide visibility and situational awareness across teams and locations by allowing users to rapidly communicate issues and incidents, giving event organisers the ability to deploy resources faster and easily crowd source event intelligence for better audit control and post event reporting.
It helps protect the sponsors brand, support the event experience and mitigate the risk associated with your insurance premium and legal liability.
What are the primary industries you serve?
We developed the platform to serve the events industry – in particular sports and festivals. Blerter is purpose-built for the idiosyncrasies and dynamics of each event.
Why is your solution important? Why is it innovative?
Events can be incredibly rewarding. But there is a fine line between getting it right and wrong. Events provide opportunities to curate wonderful experiences and as events professionals we are obligated to create an environment to make this happen.
But this is no easy task, we’ve found that most events still use radios, paper forms or apps like WhatsApp to communicate and deliver the event. These systems have inherent flaws and create disconnected teams and disorganised communication. Information often goes missing, they lack context, people can be sent to the wrong locations to deal with issues and some teams like volunteers, often, have no direct line of communication at all. They are briefed for 30 minutes before an event and told to call a number or find someone with a radio if something goes wrong. It’s not effective. There are too many opportunities for time delays to occur, which is not suitable for a time sensitive industry. It only takes one situation to escalate and the entire event is at risk.
There are currently no systems that help events centralise communications, operations and safety in one platform. That is why we are innovative.
Why partner with VolunteerLocal? How do you think this partnership will benefit the industry?
Almost every customer I have a conversation with asks if we integrate with a volunteer management system. This partnership will allow customers to build a robust technology infrastructure, leverage specialist technology in one workflow, seamlessly share data and reduce administration time by digitising the process of volunteer management, registration, briefing, training and communication.
It is a seamless end to end solution.
What’s one thing you’d like our customers to know about Blerter?
We have an extremely diverse team. Nearly 50% of our development are female and over 60% of the company coming from different countries and ethnic backgrounds. I think this has allowed us to innovate and explore new ideas much quicker than our competitors.
Where do you see the industry heading in the next 5 years? How is your company positioned to enable that growth?
I think the events industry will be the leader for leveraging experiential technologies. You can already see it happening with music artists appearing as holograms, virtual and augmented reality becoming more common amongst E-Sports and Gamers. It will dramatically change the marketing landscape, audience engagement and how sponsors will leverage their products.
Ultimately, I think it will help events drive new revenue streams and reach a larger global audience. It epitomises the global economy we now live in. Technology will allow consumers around the world to experience the atmosphere of the Super Bowl as if they were actually there, without having to buy the ticket, flights and accommodation.
To find out more about how you can use Blerter with VolunteerLocal, click here.