As an event venue business owner and manager, you likely know how crucial your venue’s capacity is to the success of your business. It affects your guest experience and revenue streams.
Most, if not all, attendees don’t appreciate events that are crowded or difficult to navigate. Then again, a venue that’s too big in relation to the number of guests can make an event feel small or sparsely attended.
A good venue and event capacity system helps you manage the number and flow of attendees. So, you can optimize your event spaces and make the most of them while keeping all attendees safe. Learn how to create a foolproof venue capacity management system below.
Understanding Venue Capacity
In the event industry, venue capacity refers to the maximum number of people an event space can safely accommodate at a time. It also accounts for  the health and safety of everyone in attendance.
This maximum number depends on several factors. Some of them being specific legal restrictions you must comply with to conduct your business operations smoothly. To fully understand your venue’s capacity, you need to pay attention to the occupancy classification and use guidelines for event venues.
You should also consider the following factors that affect a venue’s capacity.
Factors Affecting Your Venue's Capacity
Several factors determine how many people an event venue can hold at a given time, including:
Size
The bigger the venue, the more people it can hold within the legal capacity limits, and vice versa.
Layout
Your venue’s layout affects your ability to customize the space so it can fit more people. For instance, an open room layout with few corners is more flexible and customizable than an inflexible room with columns and other obstructions.
You can quickly adapt an open room to match the capacity needs of different types of events, whereas a fixed layout might be limiting.
Floor space
Floor space is the total ground surface area available for the guests of an event, excluding any partitions, walls, columns, and other obstacles, like entertainment or refreshment stands in the room. The bigger your floor space, the more people can comfortably fit in it.
Fire Codes
The fire code outlines how many people can occupy a venue at one time. It accounts for layout, size, and safety features, such as smoke detectors, fire extinguishers, and sprinklers.
These provisions follow the occupancy classifications specified by the International Building Code (IBC) and the fire safety laws of different jurisdictions. As a result, they vary by state and depend on several variables, including the type of establishment, how flammable its equipment is, exit routes, obstructions, etc.
Your venue’s capacity cannot exceed your municipality’s fire code limits.
Use
How you use a space affects the number of guests you can host. Will the attendees be seated or standing? If they'll be seated, will it be the auditorium-style seating arrangement or banquet round tables arrangement? Each type of use demands different amounts of space for every person in attendance.
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Creating a Venue Capacity Management System
Here’s a step-by-step process you can follow to create a venue capacity management system that's perfect for your specific event venue business.
1. Determine the Size of Your Event Spaces
The first step to creating an appropriate venue capacity management system is determining the size of usable space in your venue. The usable space refers to the amount of space available for attendees, not the overall dimensions of your venue.
This means constructed elements, like the bar or half walls, don’t count.
Chances are you already have a diagram of your venue with various space dimensions. If these are up-to-date and give you an accurate picture of your usable space, you can skip this step.
If not, find a measuring wheel and walk through your venue. You want to measure the length and width of your event space while getting a sense of its schematics or layouts to get the total usable area in square footage.
If a room is open and rectangular, multiply its length and width to get the area. If shaped oddly, divide it into small rectangles and calculate the area of each rectangle separately. Then, add these different areas to find the total usable square footage.
As for rooms with unusable spaces, calculate the entire room’s area. Then, the area of the unusable space and subtract it from the entire room’s area. Say the unusable space is behind the bar or stage.
Usable space = the area of the whole room – the bar or stage area
Remember to record all the measurements and calculations. You can keep rough sketches of the layouts and refine them later.
2. Establishing Maximum Capacity Limits
Once you know how much usable space you have, you can easily calculate the maximum number of visitors your venue can support per event. It all depends on how your space will be used.
As a rule of thumb, use six square feet per visitor for standing crowds. With this, the optimum usable space for the 100-people cocktail event would be 600 (6 x 100) square feet if they were all standing.
If it’s a combination of seated and standing crowds, work with eight square feet as the per-person estimate, and if there’s a need for dance space, increase it to nine square feet.
For meetings, the best capacity for a venue depends on the arrangement of seats within the room. Conferences with a classroom-style seating arrangement would probably require more space (around 14 – 18 square feet) per person. Whereas conferences with an auditorium-style seating arrangement less space (6 – 8 square feet per person).
The same goes for dinner parties and other similar events. The size of usable space for rectangular table seating (approximately 9 – 10 square feet per person) differs from round table seating (11 – 12 square feet).
In addition to helping you make the most of your event venues by matching the best spaces to the right events, the information above helps with marketing. You’ll be able to advise potential clients on what venue would work well for them and why, increasing your chances of making the sale.
Once you know your venue’s current event capacity in numbers, you can use these valuable insights to optimize your spaces in the next step. Don’t forget to cross-check with your municipality’s fire codes to ensure your maximum capacity is within legal limits.
3. Connect Venue Capacity to Event Activities
Part of your job as an event manager is to ensure optimum use of your facilities and resources. In line with this, your venue capacity management system should capture which spaces work well for different events based on their size and maximum capacity limits.
You wouldn’t want to hire out 400 square feet of space for a cocktail event with 100 guests in attendance as it might be too small, leading to overcrowding. At the same time, 1200 square feet of space might be too large for such a crowd, wasting your resources. Both situations will lead to a poor guest experience that can put your business’s reputation on the line.
To prevent overcrowding and ensure customers enjoy their experience, match an event’s crowd density and activities to your space’s capacity as we showed you above.
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Monitoring Capacity Levels
Your venue and event capacity management system won’t be complete without a way to monitor the capacity levels of your venues in real-time. You’ll need to partner with a reputable event capacity management platform in this step to simplify things and save time.
The best capacity management platforms allow customization. Through their zone and flow features, you can divide your venue into zones based on the insights you got from steps one to three above. Then, set the allowed maximum occupancy levels and alerts to receive notifications when these areas are almost full.
Some platforms allow you to link various zones. When visitors move from one area to another, the numbers in both zones adjust automatically. There’s also a live control dashboard to track the number of visitors in all areas – at all times. With these features, you can monitor and control traffic flow into your spaces, preventing overcrowding and making informed decisions to ensure the premises remain safe for everyone.
Conclusion
Without the right tools, managing an event space business can be overwhelming. There are several business operations to keep tabs on to succeed.
If you follow the steps above, you’ll have a foolproof venue capacity management system to help you maximize your venue’s usable space while keeping its capacity within the required legal limits. But this is only one aspect of running your event business.
To further simplify your duties as an event manager, consider adding a venue management platform to your arsenal of tools. The best venue management platform will streamline your sales process, internal communications, and other day-to-day operations to increase your team’s productivity and output. One efficient venue management tool to consider is Perfect Venue.
Book a free demo to see how Perfect Venue can help your company thrive.
