itSMF 2017 September Bulletin Bulletin - September 2017 | Page 4

By Stephen Mann
By David Chambers
Background & Objectives
Capturing and understanding the number of attendees
within an open space is essential for anyone investing
resources into public events or shopping precincts,
especially for various city councils such as the City of Greater
Geelong (CoGG) who invest resources in the form of both
money and public services into many events throughout the
year which aim to increase tourism and business within the
Greater Geelong area.
It is often that councils have difficulty in assessing the
effectiveness of their investment into these funded events
for the purposes of future budget allocation as their
targeted objectives for the investment are difficult to
monetise due to the inability and/or inaccuracy of collecting
relevant data relating to the number of visitors to these
events. Furthermore, the allocation and coordination of
associated public infrastructure such as toilets, waste
disposal facilities and volunteers provided by council to
these events may at times be allocated simply on ‘gut
feeling’ or estimates of the expected number of attendees
4 itSMF Bulletin—September 2017
which lack reliable data on which they are calculated.
It is apparent that a gap lies in this area and that a reliable
solution is required to assist councils in depicting data
across a range of dates and times, so that patterns may be
established to assist with future planning and
furthermore determine the effectiveness of investment as
a driver for attendance (or any other key driver) with the
ability of assessing such investment post-event in a timely
and cost effective manner
Challenges
One of the major challenges in open space events is that
the areas are inherently open and uncontrolled in the
sense that an almost endless number of points of entry,
pathways and thoroughfares may exist. Current known
pedestrian traffic counting methods, although helpful,
have been deemed inaccurate because of this factor,
which make them unsuitable.
A brief summary of these methods are explained on the
following page.