Campus rules to check before you sell a single ticket

Check whether your group may charge at all, what the room's legal capacity is, whether a risk assessment or approval form is required, who holds the alcohol licence, and what insurance covers your activity. Get each answer in writing before you pick a date, because approval timelines are set by other people's calendars.

The order that saves you a term

Most societies plan an event and then discover a rule. The rule then forces a change of date, and the new date is three weeks later, and by then the term is over.

Doing it the other way costs an afternoon. Ask the five questions below before you commit to anything, and every subsequent decision is made against a real constraint rather than an assumption.

Ask in writing. Not because anyone will mislead you, but because the person who told you verbally in October will have moved on by February, and a message you can point at settles it instantly.

The five questions

The lead-time column is the important one. A four-week approval process is not an obstacle if you knew about it in week one and a disaster if you find it in week five.

Whether you may charge at all

This is the question that most often changes the plan, and it is the one societies least often ask.

Institutions vary widely. Some require all ticketed student activity to run through a union account. Some require a named officer to be responsible. Some have no view at all and are surprised to be asked. All three are workable, and only one of them is workable if you find out afterwards.

If the answer is that money must flow through the union, build that into the timeline. Union finance processes are usually slower than a commercial account, and the delay between selling tickets and being able to pay a supplier can be weeks rather than days.

Capacity is a number, not an impression

Every room has a specific legal capacity recorded by whoever manages the building. It is frequently lower than the number people assume from looking at the space, particularly once seating layout and exit routes are counted.

Get the figure and set your ticket cap below it, allowing for staff, performers and anyone on a guest list. Selling past capacity is the mistake that gets an event stopped on the night, and being stopped on the night is considerably worse than any other outcome discussed here.

It also affects the rest of your requirements. Many institutions attach extra conditions above a headcount threshold, so a slightly smaller event sometimes avoids a great deal of process.

Risk assessments are shorter than they sound

The phrase puts people off and the document is usually a page. What could go wrong, how likely is it, what are you doing about it, who is responsible.

• Ask for a template. Every union has one and starting from a blank page is the only hard version of this task.
• Name a specific person for each item rather than the committee. Assessments with no named individual get sent back.
• Cover the ordinary things: crowding at entry and exit, alcohol, trip hazards, someone becoming unwell, and how you would clear the room.
• Submit early. The approval clock starts when you submit, not when you started writing it.

The exercise is also genuinely useful, which surprises people. Most of the things that go wrong at student events are things a fifteen-minute assessment would have raised.

Alcohol, and who is actually responsible

If drink is involved, the licence sits with the venue rather than with your society, and it comes with conditions about serving hours, supervision and who may serve.

Two things catch societies out. Bringing your own alcohol into a licensed space is usually prohibited, even for a private event. And everyone drinking must be of legal drinking age, which is a different threshold from being allowed to attend.

Ask what the venue expects from you specifically, because the conditions are theirs to enforce and they will hold your committee to them.

External speakers and anything filmed

Two categories attract extra process almost everywhere, and both surprise committees who assumed a talk was the simplest possible event.

External speakers usually require notification and sometimes approval, with a lead time that can run to several weeks. The requirement is not about the individual, it applies to anyone from outside the institution, and it is enforced regardless of how uncontroversial the topic is. Ask what your institution needs and how long it takes before you invite anybody, because withdrawing an invitation is much worse than delaying one.

Filming and recording has its own rules. Consent from anyone identifiable, restrictions in some spaces, and separate permission if you intend to publish. If a speaker has agreed to attend but not to be recorded, that distinction needs to be established before the day rather than resolved by someone with a phone in the front row.

Ticketing an event with an external speaker also raises the stakes on cancellation. If the speaker withdraws and people have paid, you owe refunds and an explanation, so a conditional listing that only charges once the event is confirmed is a sensible structure here.

What the rules will not tell you

Write it down for next year

Every answer you get is worth more to next year's committee than to you, because they will otherwise ask the same five questions from scratch and get the same four-week delay.

Keep one page in a place the society owns rather than a personal account. Who to ask for each thing, what they said, how long it took, and which room had what capacity. It takes twenty minutes and it is the single most useful thing a committee can hand over.