I'll leave the foriegn policy and political blogging aside for a bit and instead apply some of my geekdom on creating & managing a hard core, all-out, good time.  

A few friends & I threw a pretty large party here in SF last Saturday night (May 17).   Ostensibly, it was "just a party" but my 30th bday the previous Wednesday provided a convenient excuse to motivate some out-of-towners to get down to SF (including a few blog-friends  ;-) & join the festivities.  My co-hosts & I wanted to throw a "mid-sized" party in the city which meant we were targeting a shindig of about 150 of our closest friends & acquaintances.  

Our crowd is generally the professional, Yuppy set - the middle 80% of the age range was between 26-34 and most folks were Silicon Valley-ites (techies, marketing, sales) and a few outlying professions (medical, finance, legal).   We also knew that our party would involve a fair amount of drinking & dancing but still be a tad more sophisticated than the usual Animal House faire.

I think we had an intuitive idea about the logistics but we had to generally feel our way through quite a few of the issues involved -- particularly around crowd management.   Many many many times, I wish I had found someplace on the Internet that summarized the important stuff. 

Not finding it, I semi-diligently kept a tally of some of the key numbers / lessons that I think are critical for folks who might consider throwing these sorts of events.

The Numbers:

By far, the biggest source of concern in the party was managing the crowd.    At first it looked like we'd be well under budget and then later, it looked like we were going to have too many.   The thought of having close friends waiting in line outside while the door bouncer managed venue capacity was very disconcerting & we were, in hindsight, overcautious about adding new folks to the evite.

After the first batch of invitations went out, we expected some relatively linear growth in our total headcount as friend brought friends and so on -

So, when all is said and done, the KEY goal of the host is matching up the Peak Hour yield with the capacity of the venue.   In our case, 574 invitees, yielded 300 RSVPs which yielded ~120 peak hour attendees - a total downstream yield of ~25%.   Capacity on the venue was ~200 so our capacity utilization was a respectable 60%  (although 75-80% would have been ideal).

Rule of Thumb for Next Time: YES = Capacity x 2 ;  INVITEES = Capacity x 4;  to get to 75-80% capacity utilization, the Yes RSVP's needs to reach 2 x the stated capacity.

So, in our case, we had a 200 person capacity in the venue which meant we needed to drive approximately 400 RSVP's.   Using the RSVP yield we saw from this event, it could mean inviting up to *800* people  (in actuality, we probably need well below this number -- don't forget the nearly 100% expansion from folks who bring guests! I would NOT manage with the invitee number + yield in mind, focus instead on RSVP's and discount the flakes).   400 RSVP's results in ~267 folks after the flakeouts and 175ish at peak hour.

The Evites

One strategy we adopted was to float multiple evites for the event.   This allowed each host (there were 4 of us total) to create custom messages / guest rules for their group.   The bucketing also allowed us to do some pretty fine grained crowd management - we could shut off additions from just one of the evites at a time to manage our yield rate.

I scoured the stats from the evites daily and the following table summarizes our yields at 10 day intervals leading up to the party:

A particularly interesting stat that we tracked was the yield curve and how it reacted to external shocks.   In particular, note that each reminder that we sent out bumped up our RSVP yield by about 10% within 3-4 days.

The Venue:

We choose Beale Street Bar in downtown San Francisco.   I found it by searching BarstoClubs which lists bars in SF.  Several factors influenced this choice.  

• Availability - we booked ~ 2 months prior to the target event date but still found a few of our candidate venues unavailable
• Lots of space compartments -- the venue is 2 stories w/ a dancefloor upstairs, bar downstairs, and 2 patios in front and back.   This gave us a large contiguous space upstairs for the main dance floor but separate, quieter spaces outside of the dance floor for guests to mingle / mack / whatever.
• Not normally open on weekends - we got this place at a VERY low price because they aren't usually open on weekends -- therefore less opportunity cost for the proprietors;  we paid in the low single digit hundreds to rent out the place
• LOTS of parking - this is literally a bar in the middle of a parking lot.   And most of the streets around it had streetside parking -- I can't tell you how big of a feature this is in downtown San Francisco;  in retrospect we probably should have advertised this fact more within our evites.
• VERY helpful management -- The proprietor was a great guy and very helpful w.r.t. the teardown / rearrangement of the bar that we needed to really make the space danceable upstairs.   With some VERY simple / low cost cosmetic work on the bar, we cranked it up a few notches  (without which, the venue was a little divey)

If any of you are shopping for a place to throw a party in SF, I recommend Beale Street.

A KEY statistic to keep in mind when negotiating for a facility like this is the expected bar tab that the crowd creates.   Obviously, this is where the venue makes most of their $$$ (especially if they don't charge cover at the door) and is a critical piece of knowledge for the rentee as you wrestle with other concessions.  

In our case, our 200 folks created a tab of $2500 -- about $12.50 in drinks per person.   This was a surprisingly high number especially since the crowd we drew was a mix of (supposedly) strait-laced professionals with only a few serious drinkers.   Further, Beale Street Bar charged our guests VERY reasonable prices / drink -- especially by San Francisco standards (about $4/beer;  $3/well drink).    And, on top of all that, we the hosts had pre-purchased a large number of free Hurricane shots for the crowd  -- if you include those, the final bar tab was probably close to $15/person.

Host & Support Staff:

A lot of lessons for the hosts of the party --

• the more official hosts, the better -- it defrays costs, taps into more friends' circles, improves the yields, reduces risks, gets more creative, etc.  
• Semi-Hosts are key -- Much like the military and the NCO corps, the semi-hosts are the true backbone of the party.  These are folks who are very good friends of the hosts who go above and beyond the normal call of duty of a guest.   They tend to arrive a little early and help "open up" the party by providing critical mass sooner rather than later.   They walk around and help people circulate but aren't obliged to work the entire party.    In many ways, this is probably the choicest job for the entire gig -- you get the privilege of being able to mingle with everyone but not as much responsibility so you actually can spend a good % of the evening with your "chosen one"  ;-)
• host markers -- we purchased some cheap, wearable blinking LED lights to mark the hosts in the party.   The markers were cheap, fun, but not too tacky and worked well.   If you've gone through all the effort to host / create the event, you'd better get at least a little bit of recognition out of it.
• most games don't work -- we considered giving away Mardi Gras beads + other gimmicks but never got around to it over the course of the evening.   In general, the hosts are too busy to pull this stuff off and, in a multi-space venue like Beale Street Bar, it's hard to centrally organize this kind of stuff
• in a bar, people drink -- seems obvious in hindsight but we weren't 100% sure that enough people would be "socially lubricated" so we put down a good chunk of change into buying free drinks For The People.   As the bar tab illustrates, this was NOT necessary to get people loosened up.   In the future, there are probably more efficient allocation schemes -- for ex. buying a small number of drink tickets which are redeemable for a drink.   These can be distributed to the Truly Needy (e.g. grad students & very close friends).   The bar, of course accepts these in lieu of $$$ and then we reimburse the bar at the end of the night for drink tickets consumed

Music & Dancing

• the DJ played ~80% American and 20% Indian music;   This mix seemed to work out well  (it's always tricky when you've got a large # of people from an ethnic group that LOVES it's music / dancing -- the white folks react a little nervously when they feel like they're in the minority  ;-)
• our DJ mentioned several times that "anyone can play tunes, real DJ's have lights + smoke"   -- He's absolutely right.   The denizens got "frisky" everytime a puff of smoke hit.  This added a LOT to the scene.