[jpelletier]

• Do you have more than one event per day in your space?? (i.e. will you do a flip during the day) – rarely. Set-up for both events would need to look very similar?
• Is there a set time that you designate between events for event set-ups? – variable, depends on the complexity of the set-up. Some need a full set-up day, especially if we are working with an outside vendor
• Who is doing your furniture set-ups – student crew or professional staff? students, with assistance from student life FTE as needed
• Who is doing your AV – student crew or professional staff? mostly students, but we do supplement with outside labor and Student Life FTE. Some programs require a full vendor production, but we still assign a student as an on-site tech to assist the outside team
• We do late night student organization events in our spaces.? What is your cut-off time for late night events? – negotiable. building closes at 11pm (8pm during break), but clients can pay for a late close. We are always mindful of safety and security needs as it relates to late-night events for participants and our staff.

——————————
Jeff Pelletier, MA, MBOE, LSSBB
Ohio Union Director
The Ohio State University
Columbus, OH
614-292-3290
——————————
——————————————-
Original Message:
Sent: 11-29-2023 09:26
From: Laura Ballou
Subject: Ballroom Set-ups

Hi all-

I wanted to collect some information from other schools on how they manage their ballroom and other large multipurpose spaces.  My questions are:

• Do you have more than one event per day in your space?  (i.e. will you do a flip during the day)  Is there a set time that you designate between events for event set-ups?
• Who is doing your furniture set-ups – student crew or professional staff?  Who is doing your AV – student crew or professional staff?
• We do late night student organization events in our spaces.  What is your cut-off time for late night events?

Thanks!

——————————
Laura Ballou
Assistant Dean, Student Life Operations
University of Rochester
Rochester NY
(585) 275-2332
——————————

[Chrissie Taylor]

Hi Laura,?

Please find answers below:

• Do you have more than one event per day in your space?? (i.e. will you do a flip during the day)? Is there a set time that you designate between events for event set-ups?? We allow as many events as possible in our space.? Our hours are Monday through Friday 7am to 11pm and on weekends, Saturday 10am to 8pm, and Sunday 10am to 10pm.? We always have 30 minutes before and 30 minutes after each event, so at least an hour between events.? When there is a more difficult setup, or a VIP event, the Events Office will add more time.?
• Who is doing your furniture set-ups – student crew or professional staff? All of our furniture set-ups are completed by my student building managers. They know that they can always call me for assistance.?
• Who is doing your AV – student crew or professional staff? All of our AV set-ups are completed by my student building managers. They know they can always call me for assistance.? We have full-time staff, not housed in our budget or office, that are in our IT department that are assigned to VIP events to ensure that there are no issues.? We also have some events that will bring in outside sound.?
• We do late night student organization events in our spaces.? What is your cut-off time for late night events? Our building closes at 11pm during the week, 8pm on Saturday, and 10pm on Sunday.? We cut off programming, whether for students, staff, faculty, or guests an hour before we close.? If they are willing to pay, they can pay for a late close.? We would never extend past midnight, and if we did, it would not be my staff staying, the group would have to pay for security.??

Hope this helps!

——————————
Chrissie King
Assistant Director
Rutgers University Camden
Camden NJ
(856) 225-6449
chrissie.king@rutgers.edu
——————————
——————————————-
Original Message:
Sent: 11-29-2023 09:26
From: Laura Ballou
Subject: Ballroom Set-ups

Hi all-

I wanted to collect some information from other schools on how they manage their ballroom and other large multipurpose spaces.  My questions are:

• Do you have more than one event per day in your space?  (i.e. will you do a flip during the day)  Is there a set time that you designate between events for event set-ups?
• Who is doing your furniture set-ups – student crew or professional staff?  Who is doing your AV – student crew or professional staff?
• We do late night student organization events in our spaces.  What is your cut-off time for late night events?

Thanks!

——————————
Laura Ballou
Assistant Dean, Student Life Operations
University of Rochester
Rochester NY
(585) 275-2332
——————————

[James Conner]

• Do you have more than one event per day in your space?? (i.e. will you do a flip during the day)? Is there a set time that you designate between events for event set-ups?
  • Yes, there are days we have more than one event, sometimes up to three or four depending on duration and setup requirements.
  • We try to leave at minimum 1 hour between setups (this would be on a day with full staff and somewhat slow), we prefer to leave 2 hours if possible
• Who is doing your furniture set-ups – student crew or professional staff?? Who is doing your AV – student crew or professional staff?
  • Our custodial staff and student operations staff handle all setups in our facility (normally 2 custodians and 1 – 2 students). Our A/V is basically an HDMI connection to a projector and in-house audio (AMX touch panel to adjust volume, switch input).
• We do late night student organization events in our spaces.? What is your cut-off time for late night events?
  • Our cut off for late events is 11pm when our facility closes. Groups are told they need to be finished and out by 11pm, but we will work with them if there are issues or they have to start late for some reason.?

Thanks!

——————————
James Conner
Assistant Director for Operations, L.A. Pittenger Student Ce
Ball State University
Muncie IN
(765) 228-9173
——————————
——————————————-
Original Message:
Sent: 11-29-2023 09:26
From: Laura Ballou
Subject: Ballroom Set-ups

Hi all-

I wanted to collect some information from other schools on how they manage their ballroom and other large multipurpose spaces.  My questions are:

• Do you have more than one event per day in your space?  (i.e. will you do a flip during the day)  Is there a set time that you designate between events for event set-ups?
• Who is doing your furniture set-ups – student crew or professional staff?  Who is doing your AV – student crew or professional staff?
• We do late night student organization events in our spaces.  What is your cut-off time for late night events?

Thanks!

——————————
Laura Ballou
Assistant Dean, Student Life Operations
University of Rochester
Rochester NY
(585) 275-2332
——————————

[alisonward]

• Do you have more than one event per day in your space?? (i.e. will you do a flip during the day)? Is there a set time that you designate between events for event set-ups? Our ballroom can be divided in to multiple rooms so yes, we reset it multiple times a day. We can have up to seven events on any given day with multiple? room configurations. High profile or very detailed events automatically get extra set-up / breakdown time allotments. If back to back events have similar set-ups, we typically allot 30 minutes. However, if catering is involved, it is a minimum of an hour.?
• Who is doing your furniture set-ups – student crew or professional staff?? Who is doing your AV – student crew or professional staff? All of our spaces are set up by our Set-up Team with either Set-up Lead or Student Manager supervising them. The same applies to standard av requests. Our Tech Team sets all av with oversight from a Lead or SM. However, if it is not a standard request our Pro staff members gets involved.?
• We do late night student organization events in our spaces.? What is your cut-off time for late night events? We close at 10p Sat-Thurs, 11p Fridays. Upon request, we can and will stay open later for a fee. We don’t have a lot of late events so our student payroll projections are based on the hours listed above. Our SMs close the building, so the after-hours fee covers their payroll.

——————————
Alison Ward
Associate Director for Facilities and Operations
University of Tennessee
Knoxville TN
(865) 974-3692
——————————
——————————————-
Original Message:
Sent: 11-29-2023 09:26
From: Laura Ballou
Subject: Ballroom Set-ups

Hi all-

I wanted to collect some information from other schools on how they manage their ballroom and other large multipurpose spaces.  My questions are:

• Do you have more than one event per day in your space?  (i.e. will you do a flip during the day)  Is there a set time that you designate between events for event set-ups?
• Who is doing your furniture set-ups – student crew or professional staff?  Who is doing your AV – student crew or professional staff?
• We do late night student organization events in our spaces.  What is your cut-off time for late night events?

Thanks!

——————————
Laura Ballou
Assistant Dean, Student Life Operations
University of Rochester
Rochester NY
(585) 275-2332
——————————

[Scott Casanova]

Hi Everyone,

 

Thought I’d throw my response in for anyone tracking it even though we’re not a ballroom.  Our main space is a multipurpose auditorium. The first floor can seat up to 1,000, be set for a banquet for up to 470, and we host receptions, dance parties, expos, roller skating, and rumor has it we once hosted a car show.

 

• Do you have more than one event per day in your space?  (i.e. will you do a flip during the day)  Is there a set time that you designate between events for event set-ups?

• Yes, once in a great while 3 per day.  Our challenge is that most daytime evens are Academically/Administratively sponsored and they’re requesting reservations after we’ve done our student org scheduling which is a majority or our evening events. Due to a complete lack of similar space on campus we don’t have much authority to say no. Our Admissions office is our most frequent daytime customer. 
• We start at a 4 hour block between one event ending and any time of organized activity (soundchecks/rehearsal/etc.) for the next, but can reduce that window based on how similar setups are from one to the next.  The only changeovers that we deliberately block out programming for are on either side of a career fair or other expo set up.

[Katie Beaulieu]

Hi Laura and all!

Here are our responses…

• Do you have more than one event per day in your space?? (i.e. will you do a flip during the day)? Is there a set time that you designate between events for event set-ups? We typically have 1-2 events in our ballroom per day. It’s divisible into 3 (1 large part, 2 equal smaller parts), so we often have one event in the full ballroom or larger portion earlier in the day and then split it to maximize the number of rooms available for recurring student org meetings. We use EMS and have an hour default for setup and tear-down, resulting in 2 hours of reservation time between events. We also have another multipurpose room that is about the size of the larger subportion of our ballroom and is divisible by 3. That gets flipped more often and we have a default of 30 minutes of setup and teardown time (1 hour between).
• Who is doing your furniture set-ups – student crew or professional staff? Our student staff do the conversions. We do not have a special conversion crew and can typically handle setups needed during our hours of operation. Rarely do we have to do an extensive late night conversion from an evening event to an early morning event the next day. Who is doing your AV – student crew or professional staff? Speakers are built into the ceiling, and we do not hang line arrays or additional sound support. So no staffing is required to use the ballroom but we will have technicians for high profile events requiring more extensive AV equipment like a mixer or switcher (typically a professional staff person but could be a student if they are there at the request of the client to ensure there are no issues with the built in sound).
• We do late night student organization events in our spaces.? What is your cut-off time for late night events? During the week, we close at midnight but have events scheduled to end by 11:00pm. We have encountered issues with events running behind schedule or room conversions taking time away from building closing procedures, and so we have built in a buffer during the week. On the weekend, we close at 9pm and it’s rare we’ll have an evening event so we don’t have a buffer, but we try to be proactive and remind the event organizers they need to be out by 9.

Hope this helps! Great to learn what others are doing too!

——————————
Katie Beaulieu
Director, Student Center & Campus Reservations
Wayne State University
Detroit MI
(313) 577-0077
——————————
——————————————-
Original Message:
Sent: 11-30-2023 09:05
From: Scott Casanova
Subject: Ballroom Set-ups

Hi Everyone,

 

Thought I’d throw my response in for anyone tracking it even though we’re not a ballroom.  Our main space is a multipurpose auditorium. The first floor can seat up to 1,000, be set for a banquet for up to 470, and we host receptions, dance parties, expos, roller skating, and rumor has it we once hosted a car show.

 

• Do you have more than one event per day in your space?  (i.e. will you do a flip during the day)  Is there a set time that you designate between events for event set-ups?

• Yes, once in a great while 3 per day.  Our challenge is that most daytime evens are Academically/Administratively sponsored and they’re requesting reservations after we’ve done our student org scheduling which is a majority or our evening events. Due to a complete lack of similar space on campus we don’t have much authority to say no. Our Admissions office is our most frequent daytime customer. 
• We start at a 4 hour block between one event ending and any time of organized activity (soundchecks/rehearsal/etc.) for the next, but can reduce that window based on how similar setups are from one to the next.  The only changeovers that we deliberately block out programming for are on either side of a career fair or other expo set up.

[drayarmijo@unm.edu]

• Do you have more than one event per day in your space?? We do have multiple events in our large spaces (ballrooms and larger meeting rooms) in one day. The time for the flip is dependent on the complexity of the set-up. Our scheduling offices tries to give the crew as much time as possible, but there have been times were we have an hour to complete an entire ballroom flip.
• Who is doing your furniture set-ups – student crew or professional staff?? Who is doing your AV – student crew or professional staff? We have an event crew who is all students and one full time staff member who oversees the staff. We schedule student staff based off events taking place, so some events call for more staff than others to complete. We have combined our AV and setup crew to one large crew. This way all students involved with the event set ups are knowledgeable with both aspects of set ups. It has worked quite nicely for us since we made the change a few years back.?
• We do late night student organization events in our spaces.? What is your cut-off time for late night events? Our building is open till 9pm daily unless a specific event requests to stay open later but a late closing fee is applied. This is mainly for off campus customers or departmental events. Student organizations keep their weekly meetings within the hours of the building.?

Hope this helps!

Dennis Armijo

Associate Director, Student Union Building Operations

University of New Mexico

——————————
Dennis Armijo
Associate Director
University of New Mexico
Albuquerque NM
(505) 277-0839
——————————
——————————————-
Original Message:
Sent: 11-29-2023 09:26
From: Laura Ballou
Subject: Ballroom Set-ups

Hi all-

I wanted to collect some information from other schools on how they manage their ballroom and other large multipurpose spaces.  My questions are:

• Do you have more than one event per day in your space?  (i.e. will you do a flip during the day)  Is there a set time that you designate between events for event set-ups?
• Who is doing your furniture set-ups – student crew or professional staff?  Who is doing your AV – student crew or professional staff?
• We do late night student organization events in our spaces.  What is your cut-off time for late night events?

Thanks!

——————————
Laura Ballou
Assistant Dean, Student Life Operations
University of Rochester
Rochester NY
(585) 275-2332
——————————

[Luke Parnell]

Hi Laura,

1) More than one per day is a possibility.? Certain requests or events might warrant booking a space for an entire day to avoid issues with staffing or to allow more flexibility.? For room flips, time will be blocked based on the workload as to not stress the team.? We’ll even occasionally accommodate mid-event room changes but it will be coordinated ahead of time and there will be an additional labor charge.
2) Furniture is a little mixed – our contracted cleaning service will arrange the furniture in public spaces when it gets moved by guests.? If there’s a furniture request for an event then our setup staff will handle that.? Maintenance/reupholstering of furniture is overseen by our facilities team.
AV event coordinating and projects are handled by full time AV staff but equipment setups and event technicians are mostly handled by student staff.
3) Midnight is the cutoff for most events, events that have labor assigned to them can run later.

Thank you,

Luke Parnell
Event Services Program Manager
Student Centers?
University of Houston?
832-842-6163

——————————
Luke Parnell
Media Services Program Manager
University of Houston
Houston TX
(832) 618-2971
——————————
——————————————-
Original Message:
Sent: 11-29-2023 09:26
From: Laura Ballou
Subject: Ballroom Set-ups

Hi all-

I wanted to collect some information from other schools on how they manage their ballroom and other large multipurpose spaces.  My questions are:

• Do you have more than one event per day in your space?  (i.e. will you do a flip during the day)  Is there a set time that you designate between events for event set-ups?
• Who is doing your furniture set-ups – student crew or professional staff?  Who is doing your AV – student crew or professional staff?
• We do late night student organization events in our spaces.  What is your cut-off time for late night events?

Thanks!

——————————
Laura Ballou
Assistant Dean, Student Life Operations
University of Rochester
Rochester NY
(585) 275-2332
——————————

[Brian Holifield]

Hi Laura and everyone,

Here are the answers to this question as it relates to DePaul University in Chicago:?

• Do you have more than one event per day in your space?? (i.e. will you do a flip during the day)? Is there a set time that you designate between events for event set-ups?? ?There are many days where we have multiple events in our two larger spaces (Commons and Student Center Multipurpose Room). Since the Commons is a smaller facility capped at 150, we usually give ourselves about 2 hours in between events to set up. As for our larger space in the Student Center that can have events for up to 600 theatre style, EMS has a built-in time of 3 hours minimal. We probably in both areas at most have 2 events a day. A rarity we will have three. That would depend on if the setups between two of the three events were similar. At times clients may try to see if they can enter the space earlier for the later event, however we always have a dialogue between the event staff and operations on if that is even a possibility.?

• Who is doing your furniture set-ups – student crew or professional staff?? Who is doing your AV – student crew or professional staff? Most furniture setups are completed by the Student Building Manager and Crew staff. While we do not necessarily require the Student Manager to complete every setup in our facility, they are responsible for the condition and look of the setup.? For larger or more complicated VIP events, either myself or the Night/Weekend Operations Manager will assist with the setup to make sure the space looks good. As for AV, we have student employees who set most of the AV in the building and the FT staff assist with troubleshooting or setting a more complicated setup. At times, I may take the lead with the event if I know the client has challenging AV needs. Those tend to be more M-F departmental events.?

• We do late night student organization events in our spaces.? What is your cut-off time for late night events? Years ago we used to have some student organizations want to put together late night events where we would be open until 2 am. Both interest in these events has waned and our hours were reduced from 7 am-1 am seven days a week to 7:30 am-12 am M-Th, 7:30 am F, and 9 am-10 pm weekends (post pandemic). We may occasionally allow an organization to keep us open late until 12 am on Friday or Saturday, however I think due to safety concerns of our staff and the University as a whole, these types of events may have to go through much planning before they are even considered or approved.?

——————————
Brian Holifield
Assistant Director of Operations
DePaul University
Chicago IL
(773) 325-4081
——————————
——————————————-
Original Message:
Sent: 11-30-2023 13:49
From: Luke Parnell
Subject: Ballroom Set-ups

Hi Laura,

1) More than one per day is a possibility.  Certain requests or events might warrant booking a space for an entire day to avoid issues with staffing or to allow more flexibility.  For room flips, time will be blocked based on the workload as to not stress the team.  We’ll even occasionally accommodate mid-event room changes but it will be coordinated ahead of time and there will be an additional labor charge.
2) Furniture is a little mixed – our contracted cleaning service will arrange the furniture in public spaces when it gets moved by guests.  If there’s a furniture request for an event then our setup staff will handle that.  Maintenance/reupholstering of furniture is overseen by our facilities team.
AV event coordinating and projects are handled by full time AV staff but equipment setups and event technicians are mostly handled by student staff.
3) Midnight is the cutoff for most events, events that have labor assigned to them can run later.

Thank you,

Luke Parnell
Event Services Program Manager
Student Centers 
University of Houston 
832-842-6163

——————————
Luke Parnell
Media Services Program Manager
University of Houston
Houston TX
(832) 618-2971
——————————

Original Message:
Sent: 11-29-2023 09:26
From: Laura Ballou
Subject: Ballroom Set-ups

Hi all-

I wanted to collect some information from other schools on how they manage their ballroom and other large multipurpose spaces.  My questions are:

• Do you have more than one event per day in your space?  (i.e. will you do a flip during the day)  Is there a set time that you designate between events for event set-ups?
• Who is doing your furniture set-ups – student crew or professional staff?  Who is doing your AV – student crew or professional staff?
• We do late night student organization events in our spaces.  What is your cut-off time for late night events?

Thanks!

——————————
Laura Ballou
Assistant Dean, Student Life Operations
University of Rochester
Rochester NY
(585) 275-2332
——————————

[Sarah Feldman]

Hi Laura!

We have 2 larger spaces that would fall under the “ballroom” category. For the space that is inside our Student Center, we constantly have multiple events in there per day. The set up time we have for that is 1 hour and 30 minutes. The second larger space I would less it’s less frequent that there are multiple events a day. This space I am less familiar with but I would guess our set up time is also 1 hour and 30 minutes or potentially 2 hours. These set up times are always flat and do not change based on the event details.?

In the room that is in the Student Center, we have our student Building Managers flip the room. The event space that we oversee in a separate building is set up by other university facility/housekeeping staff. In both spaces, our student Building Managers are running the tech. These tech shifts are on a pickup basis, obviously depending on the technological needs of an events. The Building Managers do get paid at a higher rate for the tech shifts as incentive to pick them up outside of their regular weekly works.

During the semester, our building is open until midnight and on the weekends we’re typically open until 10pm but clients are permitted to pay for late closes. The late closes are way more frequently used by our external clients and in my experience so far it’s only been maybe one or two student orgs that even have interest in staying past those closing perimeters.?

——————————
Sarah Feldman
Operations Manager
Temple University
Philadelphia PA
——————————
——————————————-
Original Message:
Sent: 11-29-2023 09:26
From: Laura Ballou
Subject: Ballroom Set-ups

Hi all-

I wanted to collect some information from other schools on how they manage their ballroom and other large multipurpose spaces.  My questions are:

• Do you have more than one event per day in your space?  (i.e. will you do a flip during the day)  Is there a set time that you designate between events for event set-ups?
• Who is doing your furniture set-ups – student crew or professional staff?  Who is doing your AV – student crew or professional staff?
• We do late night student organization events in our spaces.  What is your cut-off time for late night events?

Thanks!

——————————
Laura Ballou
Assistant Dean, Student Life Operations
University of Rochester
Rochester NY
(585) 275-2332
——————————

[Monica Duran]

• Do you have more than one event per day in your space?? (i.e. will you do a flip during the day)? Is there a set time that you designate between events for event set-ups?
  • We have a designated minimum amount of time for our major event spaces – 4 hours or 6 hours; can be longer if it is a complicated flip; staging, power distribution, etc. So we can do mid-day flips if it is early in the morning and late into the evening; but it doesn’t happen too often.
• Who is doing your furniture set-ups – student crew or professional staff?? Who is doing your AV – student crew or professional staff?
  • student staff do all of our furniture setups with a full time staff manager overseeing the team; students are also trained on our AV with varying levels, managed by our full time Media Tech Lead to oversee the equipment and help when troubleshooting on site fails
• We do late night student organization events in our spaces.? What is your cut-off time for late night events?
  • we have moved this year to having 12am be the absolute latest that students or clients are allowed in our spaces. we also clearly communicate that if they are paying for late close (building close is at 10 weekday, 11 weekend); then their event program still needs to end early. too many occurrences of cleanup taking longer than expected or music not being shut off so the party keeps going. Urban campus, so we have to prioritize safety of our student staff.?

——————————
Monica Duran
Associate Director for Event & Information Services
Husky Union Building (HUB)

Box 352230
4001 E Stevens Way NE | Seattle, WA 98195-2230
206.616.3834
meduran@uw.edu | Pronouns: She / Her
——————————
——————————————-
Original Message:
Sent: 11-29-2023 09:26
From: Laura Ballou
Subject: Ballroom Set-ups

Hi all-

I wanted to collect some information from other schools on how they manage their ballroom and other large multipurpose spaces.  My questions are:

• Do you have more than one event per day in your space?  (i.e. will you do a flip during the day)  Is there a set time that you designate between events for event set-ups?
• Who is doing your furniture set-ups – student crew or professional staff?  Who is doing your AV – student crew or professional staff?
• We do late night student organization events in our spaces.  What is your cut-off time for late night events?

Thanks!

——————————
Laura Ballou
Assistant Dean, Student Life Operations
University of Rochester
Rochester NY
(585) 275-2332
——————————