Six weeks out: the list and the roles
Decide who owns the list. One person, with the right to merge, correct and refuse rows. Everybody else contributes names through that person or through a shared file that person cleans. Decide the segments at the same time: VIP, press, partners, employees, plus-ones. A segment is what later decides which door a guest uses and which report they appear in.
Give the team roles that match their jobs. An assistant who manages the list should not see billing; an agency partner should see one client; the colleague on the door should see the scanner and nothing else. Roles set in advance are roles nobody argues about on the night.
- One list owner with the right to refuse rows.
- Segments agreed: VIP, press, partners, employees, plus-ones.
- Roles assigned: who manages the list, who sends, who reads reports, who works the door.
- Consent noted per source of names.
Five weeks out: the sender and the invitation
Verify the sending domain. The invitation must come from the company’s own domain, from a sender guests recognise, with the records that let receiving servers confirm it. This takes a day the first time and is the difference between the inbox and the spam folder.
Build the invitation from the event’s data, with the company’s logo, the programme, a calendar button and one personal reply link. Preview the real email on a phone. Get the approval you need on the preview, not on a mock-up, and keep the approved version.
- Sending domain verified; sender name agreed.
- Invitation built from event blocks; date, time and place read from the event.
- Approval given on the real preview; the version kept.
Four weeks out: send, and read the delivery record
Send in one pass to the cleaned list. The next day, read the delivery record per guest: bounces get a new address, not a resend; suppressed addresses are removed from the reminder list; delivered-but-unopened guests are the first reminder’s audience.
- Sent once, from one sender.
- Bounces re-addressed within two days.
- Reply deadline set a week before the numbers are needed.
Two weeks out: replies, plus-ones, late additions
Replies come with conditions — plus-ones, meals, sessions. Keep them on the guest record. Watch the four states: coming, not coming, undecided, no answer. Send one reminder to the silence. Late names from the sales team or a partner are compared with the list before they are invited, so that nobody receives the invitation twice.
Confirm the plus-one model with the door: separate codes for each plus-one, or a group code with a count. Changing it later means re-sending codes.
- One reminder to those who have not replied; none to those who declined.
- Late additions compared with the list; only new names invited.
- Plus-one model decided and communicated to the door team.
The week of: doors, devices, exceptions
Name the doors — main, VIP, press — and assign devices and people to each. Each device is a phone tied to a named member of staff. Restrict a door to a segment where that is the rule, so the VIP entrance admits VIP codes only, enforced by the system rather than by memory. Agree who can approve an exception at the door and make sure the approval is recorded with a name and a reason.
Test the no-signal case in the actual room. If the basement has no coverage, the devices must hold the list and queue admissions, and the team must know what the screen looks like when it is offline.
- Doors named; devices and people assigned; segment restrictions set.
- Exception approvers named; approvals recorded.
- Offline behaviour tested on site.
- A plan for walk-ins: who may add a guest at the door.
The morning after: the report
Produce the report the same day, while the questions are fresh: invited, replied, admitted, by name and by segment; those who promised and did not come; those who came without replying; re-entries, repeated scans and approvals as separate lines; arrival times by door. Export it in the form the reader accepts — a formatted spreadsheet for operations, a page for the leadership team — and keep the event with its list and report for next year’s planning.
- Report produced the next day, by name and segment.
- Exceptions listed with the approver.
- Exported in the form the reader accepts.
- Event kept with its list and report.
Throughout: the data
A guest list for a company event is personal data about customers, partners and journalists. Know where it is processed, who can export it, and how a guest is removed on request. Ask the vendor what is not in place yet, and prefer the one that answers.