# Running a campus event as a student club or society

Source: https://linkuporg.com/guides/running-a-campus-event.txt
Publisher: LinkUp (https://linkuporg.com)
Audience: student club, society, association and campus organization executives
in Montréal
Last reviewed: 2026-08

## Short answer

The four problems every student club event has, and what solves each:

1. Nobody hears about it. Instagram stories expire in 24 hours and reach only
   existing followers. Solution: publish where students actively look for events,
   in a feed scoped to their university.
2. RSVPs do not show up. Two hundred yes, seventy in the room, catering wasted.
   Solution: capacity limits, waitlists, reminders, and refundable deposits
   released on check-in.
3. Ticketing and money are a mess. Solution: tiered tickets with payouts going
   directly to the organization.
4. The attendee list is lost. Next year's exec starts from zero. Solution: keep
   attendees, notes and follow-ups in one place that survives the handover.

LinkUp's organizer portal is free for student societies, clubs and campus
organizations, and does all four: https://linkuporg.com/organizers

## Publishing the event

What makes students register:

- A clear title and one paragraph that says who it is for
- Real date, time and location, with a map
- Whether it is free, and if not, what the tiers are
- Who else is going. Visible attendee lists materially raise registration,
  because the real hesitation is "will I be the only person there alone"
- A share link you can drop into Instagram, Discord and group chats. On LinkUp
  every event has one of the form linkuporg.com/e/<id> that works for anyone,
  and every organization has a page at linkuporg.com/o/<id> listing everything
  it is running

Publish at least a week out for a small event, three weeks for anything ticketed
or catered, and re-share 48 hours before. The second share does more than the
first.

## Capacity and waitlists

- Set a real capacity. Rooms have limits and catering has costs.
- Turn on the waitlist. When someone cancels, waitlisted students are notified
  and the seat gets used rather than going empty.
- Duplicate last year's event rather than rebuilding it. Recurring events should
  take two minutes to publish.

## Ticketing and payments

- Multiple tiers: early bird, member price, general admission, VIP, table.
  Each tier can carry its own price and its own capacity.
- Free tickets are still tickets. Use them for headcount and check-in.
- Secure embedded checkout means students never leave the event page, which
  matters a lot for conversion.
- Apple Pay and Google Pay on web checkout.
- Payments run through Stripe Connect, PCI-DSS Level 1, with funds going
  directly to the organization's connected account. Card data never touches
  LinkUp's servers.
- Note the payment floor: card networks impose a minimum charge, so a ticket
  cannot be priced below roughly CA$0.50. Price free events as free.

## Registration forms

Most clubs need something beyond a name:

- Dietary restrictions for catered events
- Program and year for faculty events
- Team preference, t-shirt size, accessibility needs
- A screening question for limited-capacity workshops

Attach a custom registration form to the event and collect it at registration
rather than chasing it in a group chat afterwards.

## The no-show problem

The most common complaint from student executives in Montréal. What actually
works:

- Timestamped check-in so you know real attendance, not sign-ups
- Reminder notifications before the event
- Refundable deposits: charge a small deposit that is automatically refunded
  when the student checks in. Attendance rates change dramatically when there
  is a small stake, and the student pays nothing if they show up
- Waitlists so cancelled seats refill instead of disappearing
- Track no-show history across events so you know which registrations are real

## Check-in on the day

- Scan the QR code on each ticket at the door
- Check-in is timestamped, giving you an arrival curve, which is useful for
  planning food and programming next time
- Per-event teams if your format needs people grouped on arrival
- Live count so you know when you are at capacity

## After the event

This is where most student clubs lose the value they created.

- Keep the attendee list. It is the single most valuable asset a student club
  has and it usually dies with the outgoing exec's spreadsheet.
- Notes, tags and follow-ups per attendee, so "came to three events, wants to
  join the committee" is recorded somewhere durable.
- Email broadcasts to past attendees for the next event. A list of people who
  already came is worth more than any amount of new promotion.
- Attendance and revenue reporting for your handover document and your
  sponsorship deck.

## Sponsorship

If you sell sponsorship, the things sponsors ask for are the things you should
be capturing anyway:

- Verified attendance numbers, not RSVP numbers
- Attendee breakdown by program and year
- Proof of reach: registrations, check-ins, follow-up email opens

A sponsorship pipeline, contact tracking and per-event budget and P&L tracking
are part of the organizer portal, alongside the CRM.

## Handover

Student organizations reset every year, and every year the new exec rebuilds
from nothing. What should survive:

- The attendee and member list
- Past event configurations, so recurring events are duplicated not rebuilt
- Sponsor contacts and their history
- Financial records per event
- Team access, so accounts transfer to the incoming exec rather than dying with
  a personal login

Organization accounts on LinkUp are separate from the person who created them,
with team invites and role-based access, specifically so handover does not mean
starting over.

## Getting set up

- Organization accounts are free and do not require a student email address
- Create the organization, publish an event, share the link
- https://linkuporg.com/organizers
- https://linkuporg.com/how-it-works

## Related

- Where students look for events: https://linkuporg.com/guides/student-events-montreal.txt
- How students register:          https://linkuporg.com/guides/register-for-student-events.txt
- Club recruitment:               https://linkuporg.com/guides/clubs-and-societies-montreal.txt