Want to build customer satisfaction and loyalty? Safe Bars can help! A safe environment allows patrons to enjoy themselves — and want to come back.
Bar owners, managers, security personnel, and other staff are in a unique position to prevent sexual assault and create a safer space. You provide the employees, and we provide the training that makes your establishment a better place for both patrons and staff.
What’s in it for you?
Safe Bars-trained bars, restaurants, taprooms, clubs, and more reap many benefits.
- Promotion: Safe Bars promotes establishments that have taken the training on our website, social media, and collateral materials. We also provide you with a Safe Bars window decal to enhance your bar’s image as a welcoming place.
- Customer + staff satisfaction: As a Safe Bar, you show your customers and staff your commitment to providing a safe and welcoming environment. Customers are more likely to return, and staff turnover is lower if your establishment prioritizes safety and respect.
- Staff preparedness: As a Safe Bar, your staff has a greater range of strategies to use in addressing unwanted sexual aggression directed at them or at patrons. With staff more able to notice and deal with problems early, sexual aggression can be stopped before getting to the point where you need to file an incident report.
- A better bottom line: Customers who have positive experiences are more likely to return and to tell their friends. On the other hand, even one patron who has a bad experience and leaves with their friends can cost $1,000 in lost tabs over a year. Also, as a Safe Bar, you can prevent the bad PR that comes with an incident – which can be devastating!
- Becoming a Safe Bar is the right thing to do.
It’s easy! Safe Bars is a staff training that you don’t have to plan or present. Safe Bars trainers facilitate a conversation among your staff about which behaviors are okay and which are not, laying the groundwork for a formal or informal policy.
All of our trainings are customized to fit your staff, your business, and its culture. We don’t tell your staff what to do; rather, we build on their skills to create a safer and more welcoming establishment. How do we do that? Read on.
Safe Bars
- Increases bar staff understanding of how common unwanted sexual aggression is and why it happens,
- Helps bar staff recognize harassment and other inappropriate behavior,
- Provides bar staff with the skills they need to respond to such behavior safely and appropriately, whether by stepping in or when asked for help,
- Shares with patrons safety messages that encourage respect and lets customers know that bar staff are available for help, and
- Actively promotes bars that adopt safety standards.
Why bars?
About half of all those who commit sexual assault are under the influence of alcohol at the time. Unwanted sexual attention, including harassment and groping, happens frequently in bars and clubs. Sexual aggressors may use these environments as places for selecting, isolating, and even incapacitating their targets. That puts bars in a unique position to address sexual violence.
Why bystanders?
Bystander intervention is a key approach to preventing sexual violence. These programs increase how often people step in when something is happening, and they shape how bystanders respond when asked for help. Safe Bars empowers bystanders with skills to:
- Identify behaviors of aggressors,
- Intervene either proactively or in response to a request, and
- Overcome barriers to taking action.
Does it work?
Research shows that bartenders, bar staff, and young adults who patronize bars are key groups to address in preventing sexual violence. And bars that have completed our training have used the Safe Bars skills!
Join us!
If you work at or own a bar, club, restaurant, or other alcohol-serving establishment and you’d like to become a Safe Bar, we’d be happy to come and work with your staff. Contact info@safebars.org or 301-608-3708 to find out more.
“This wasn’t the first time we’ve helped someone leave a bad situation at our restaurant. We’ve always been very concerned with the safety of our customers, but the training helped us spot a more subtle interaction that we might have written off in the past as just two people meeting in a bar and hitting it off. The part of Safe Bars training that focuses on body language was of enormous help to us in identifying this situation and responding to it directly. Perhaps the situation would have led to nothing, but it’s better to be cautious and intervene early when it comes to safety than it is to be sorry after the fact.” —Sam Nellis, ChurchKey
