Guest lists, capacity and safety for student-run events

Know the room's legal capacity, count people in and out so you always know the number inside, put two people on the door instead of one, decide the guest-list total before the night, and name one person who stays sober and makes decisions. Most student event problems are door problems.

Almost everything goes wrong at the entrance

Committees plan the programme in detail and the door in passing. Then the queue builds, somebody starts waving people through to clear it, and by ten the room contains an unknown number of people.

That single failure produces most of the others. Overcrowding, arguments about who paid, people who should not be there, and a committee with no idea whether they need to stop admitting.

The fix is not complicated. It is mostly deciding things in advance so that nobody has to make a judgement call at eleven at night with twelve people watching.

Capacity, and actually holding to it

The room has a specific legal capacity held by whoever manages the building. Get the number, then set your ticket cap below it.

Ninety rather than a hundred and twenty is a meaningful revenue difference, and it is not optional. Selling to the legal limit guarantees you exceed it, because every category in that table exists whether or not you counted it.

Counting, not estimating

Someone needs to know how many people are inside at any moment, and it has to be a count rather than a look around the room.

• Use a clicker or a tally, in and out. Phones die and mental arithmetic at midnight is not reliable.
• Count people leaving as well as arriving. Without that the number only goes up and becomes useless by half past ten.
• Agree the number at which you stop admitting, and who says so. That decision has to belong to a named person before the night.
• Check the count against your ticket list periodically. A large gap means people are getting in without being checked.

Selling entry in advance helps considerably here. You arrive knowing how many people hold a place, which converts the door from a counting exercise into a checking one.

Why guest lists get out of hand

Free entries multiply under social pressure. Each performer wants two, each committee member has a housemate, and the person on the door has no basis for refusing because no number was ever agreed.

Every one of those is a seat you cannot sell and a person you did not count. Ten comps on a ninety-capacity event at ten dollars is a hundred dollars and eleven percent of your room.

Fix it with a number rather than with willpower. Decide the total before the night, write it down, allocate it, and let the door team point at the sheet. A written rule is easy to enforce and a vague policy is impossible.

Keep a couple of places unallocated for genuine surprises. Having somewhere to put an unexpected but necessary guest is what stops the whole system being abandoned at the first exception.

How to staff a door

1. 1

   Two people, not one

   One checks names and marks them off, one manages the queue and answers questions. A single person doing both creates a bottleneck, and a queue outside is what draws attention from whoever manages the building.

2. 2

   Brief them on the rules before anyone arrives

   Capacity, guest-list total, what to do with people who have no ticket, and who to fetch if there is a problem. Five minutes beforehand prevents most of what goes wrong.

3. 3

   Give them an answer for the awkward cases

   A stated rule they can point at. People argue with a person making a decision and accept a policy that clearly existed before they arrived.

4. 4

   Swap them halfway

   Door work is tiring and attention drops. Two shifts of an hour each is more reliable than one person for the whole evening, and it means nobody misses the entire event.

The sober person

One named individual stays sober for the whole event and everybody on the committee knows who it is. This is the single highest-value safety measure available to a student event and it costs nothing.

Their job is not policing. It is being the person who deals with the venue, calls for help if somebody is unwell, and makes the call if the event needs to stop. If that role is unassigned, it lands on whoever happens to be nearest at the worst moment.

Rotate it across events so it is not always the same person missing out.

Getting people out at the end

Committees plan the start of an event carefully and the end not at all, which is why so many student nights finish with four exhausted people trying to persuade thirty friends to leave a room that was due back an hour ago.

Late finishes cost you real things. Venues charge for overrunning, licence conditions specify an end time that is not negotiable, and a society that hands a room back late gets offered worse dates next term.

• Announce the finish time at the start and again thirty minutes before. People leave far more readily when it was expected.
• Stop the music before the lights go up, not at the same moment. The room empties on its own within ten minutes.
• Have somewhere for people to go next, even informally. A named pub does more to clear a room than any amount of asking.
• Assign clear-up to specific people beforehand. Otherwise it lands on the same two committee members every time and they stop volunteering.

Budget the time honestly as well. A night that ends at eleven means the committee leaves at midnight, and that is a real cost to count when deciding how often you can run something.

What a good door cannot cover

Afterwards

Write down what happened while it is fresh. Actual attendance against tickets sold, how many comps went out against the agreed number, anything that nearly went wrong.

Near-misses are the most valuable thing on that page and the thing nobody records, because by the following week everyone remembers the evening as having gone fine. Hand it to next year's committee and they inherit a working door policy instead of inventing one.