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Planning an Event

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Planning a society event

Any event you plan for your society requires input from a number of parties. Whether you're organising a single room booking, a regular society meeting or a larger one-off event, this process has been created to help you and your coordinator to create a successful activity that runs smoothly.

Any committee member can take ownership of the process, although we'd recommend nominating one person to be the pont of contact who submits the relevant forms.

The Process

  • To begin, access the Activities module in your society admin tools. This will take you to the activities dashboard which shows a summary of your current and previous requests.
     
  • To start a new request, select 'All Activities' and 'New Activity'. Then you need to complete the fields to give us an idea of what you're looking to do.
     
  • If you're hosting an on campus activity, you can select the relevant boxes to indicate whether you need to book a room or have a visiting speaker.
     
  • If your activity is off campus, you can indicate whether you need to book transport through the Union.
     
  • Once the form is complete, you can either save it as a draft or submit it to your coordinator.


You will now see any additional forms you need to complete - these will inlude any you selected as part of your submision and also any compulsorary forms we require for every event. If you click the name of the form, you can fill it in and submit it.

If you require multiples of certain forms you can press the 'Add Form' button and add extras.

If you're looking to book the same space across multiple weeks you don't need to submit a form for each week - there's more details in the FAQ's below.

FAQs

An external speaker is defined as any individual who is not either a BCU student or a BCU/BCUSU staff member, who wishes to speak on a topic to your members.

Any ratified society is able to invite external speakers onto campus to interact with society members and we will consider requests in line with the principles of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023.

This act makes provision in relation to freedom of speech and academic freedom in higher education institutions and in students’ unions. 

If you want to bring an external speaker onto campus, you should add the relevant form to your activity submision.

Please note that any external speaker requests have to be approved by the Students' Union and may also require input from the University security team. Because of this, they can take up to two weeks to be processed so please consider this when planning your event and plan as far in advance as possible.

External speakers should NOT be advertised until you have received confirmation that they can come on campus.

Any event that's being undertaken needs a risk assessment and the relevant form will be added to your activity.

  • Most standard classroom based activities will fall under the scope of our standard risk assessment.
     
  • If your activity isn't covered by that risk assessment, but is a regular session your society holds, you'll likely have completed a specific risk assessment already.
     
  • If this is a one-off, or new event which isn't covered by either of those risk assessments, you will need to submit a new one as part of the process.

 Please check the risk assessment form which will give you more detail.

My booking is for a one-off event requiring multiple rooms?

If your event requires multiple rooms (for example, two classrooms to accommodate a large number of members) then you should select the 'Add Forms' option after submiting your event and complete one form per room required.


My booking is for a regular society meeting which repeats each week?

If you are requesting the same space, on the same day and time, across multiple weeks (for example a regular society meeting), please complete one form and select 'yes' when you're asked if your request is a multiple booking request. 

Multiple booking requests for different rooms, days or times will still require additional forms to be completed.

The documents below are useful for societies looking to host events. Click on the link to download the document.

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