Insurance Made Simple Blog

Virtually all festivals use vehicles in the set up, production and take down of their event.  However, the risks associated with the use of vehicles are sometimes over looked or at least not given the level of importance it needs.  For this reason it is vital that the auto exposure be addressed in your Festival Insurance and Risk Management discussions.

We get a ton of questions about how Nonprofit Directors and Officers Insurance works and who is at risk, when they are at risk and when they are at risk.  I’ve culled out the top three most common questions and provided brief answers to help you better understand the issues at hand.

Having the appropriate and adequate Nonprofit Insurance is essential to the management of any nonprofit organization but it’s only one part of the whole risk management picture.  Another critical element is a comprehensive and functional Employee Handbook.  Employment policies that are communicated clearly and frequently to staff and applied consistently help you avoid litigation.

Here we are folks, at the beginning of a new year.  Many of us are looking forward to all that lies ahead and starting to plan.  If you are an Event Producer then you are probably already hard at work buying talent, negotiating your venue contract, working with venues, etc.  And, even though I know you don’t want to think about this now, it’s not too early to starting thinking about your event insurance needs.

Insurance isn’t enough.  Festival and Event Producers both large and small often fall under the misconception that if they have Event Insurance then they will be protected if someone is hurt or they get sued or there is some type of property damage.  I could rattle on here about appropriate limits, the correct coverages, etc., etc.  But along with your insurance coverage you need to employ various risk management strategies.

It’s a quiet time of year for Music Festivals.  This is the time of year most of our Festival and Event clients hunker down and do a lot of planning.  To that end I’ve been receiving a lot of calls lately about Festival Insurance and the various elements of Event Insurance.  So, I thought it might be a good time for a quick review.

Event Insurance is not the only thing that goes into planning a safe festival or event.  Having a solid Safety Plan in place is a key to protecting your spectators, performers, volunteers & employees.  We work with very large and very small events and everything in between and this seems to be a sticky subject for most.  The large event producers often have a Safety Plan in place but just as often don’t follow it or don’t take it seriously.  Small event producers claim that they don’t need a Safety Plan or that it’s too difficult to create a plan for a small event.

I posted on this in early August but a got a call from one of our Music Festival Insurance clients the other day about a piece missing from his Festival Insurance so I thought it was worth talking about again.  He had just received a bill from one of the several companies he rented equipment from for his festival.  It seems there was some damage done to a tent that he rented.  Unfortunately, I had to tell him there was no coverage.

This is a follow up to a post I wrote a couple weeks back about Event and Festival Insurance and stages falling down and to one I posted a while back about coverage (or lack of) for temporary structures.  In the wake of the tragic stage collapse last weekend at the Indiana State Fair and the 3 people killed today by collapsing structures at the Pukkelpop Festival in Belgium due to a bad storm, I have to say more.  Folks, these types of incidents are preventable!