Welcome to the process of booking a room or other space for your student society or sports team event!
See our full guidelines on room bookings to answer any questions and be aware of timelines and how the SU processes requests.
If food is involved in your event you will need to stick to the Food Safety Guidance.
To ensure a smooth booking experience, please follow all the steps below:
- Prepare your risk assessment
- Make the room request (deal with the extra step for externals)
- Promotion
Please allow at least 16 working days to process your society's room booking requests (- not including weekends!).
Step 1: Prepare a Risk Assessment
Before proceeding with your room booking, make sure you have a risk assessment for your event. This assessment ensures the safety and well-being of all participants. Room bookings will not be made without one of the two types of risk assessments.
you can also find the risk assessment template on the Room Bookings page.
The organiser must confirm that they are familiar with what to do in an emergency or alarm, so we reccomend you make yourself familiar with the SOAS emergency procedure.
EXTERNAL GUESTS - This includes those who are not memebers of SOAS i.e speakers, trainers and general public.
If you have any external attendees you will need to tell us. The information we need is set in the External events form above.
You will also need to send a list of the external attendees to@campussafety@soas.ac.uk 2 days before your event, or the Friday morning if your event is on a weekend.
Step 2: Request a Room or Space Through the SU Booking Site
To book a room for your event, you must fill out our room booking form on the Room Booking Site. This form helps us accomodate your needs and ensure the room you've requested is booked.
Please note: We review pending room bookings every Monday, we will not be processing room booking requests on any other day. Ensure you submit your request accordingly.
You will need to activate your room booking account with either your society email or presidents email. If you have not received anything you may need to access your quarantine folder. You can do this by following the steps outlined here: Find and release quarantined messages as a user - Microsoft Defender for Office 365 | Microsoft Learn
SOUND - Need microphones or any audio visual support?
Complete this form: Audio & Video Event Support Request Form | SOAS as soon as possible, as it requires a one months notice.
The SU has mics for the JCR, but these do not work with any other school speakers. For roaming mics, to use the BGLT sound system, clip-on mics, these only come from the schools AV department.
**AV need to know what room the event will be in, so allow a longer lead-in time, check with SU staff which room has been provisionally booked with the school.
Step 3: Confirmation and Promotion
Once your room booking is approved, you will receive an automated email from from either the Room booking site if it is an SU room, or from the University Room Booking team if it is a university room.
At this point, you are ready to start promoting your event! Here's one effective way to do it:
Native - our events platform.
Take advantage of our events platform, Native, to streamline your event promotion. You can use Native to create and manage event tickets and promotions. Plus, your event will be featured on our website for maximum visibility.
Find guidance on how to set up your event, create tickets, and view reports on Native's knowledge pages
You can put through a comms request for SU insta posts and all-student emails etc. You can also post on your societys social media and promote with Posters around the university grounds!
By following these steps, you'll be well on your way to hosting a fantastic event for your student society or sports team.
If you have any questions or need further assistance, please don't hesitate to contact us here.
We look forward to helping you make your event a success!