Inviting Guests and Presenters at Scale

A festival has a guest list long before it has an audience. Presenters and their partners, the sound engineer's family, the elders you would never ask to pay, the sponsor who took a booth, the volunteers who will be there from Thursday. Hundreds of people, each needing to be let in on different terms, and none of them should have to be trusted with a code that could end up anywhere. This is that job: bring in the list, and everyone on it gets their own way in.

A discount code exists to be typed by someone you cannot reach. That was the right shape when a code went on a printed flyer and a stranger carried it to checkout. It is the wrong shape when you already have the person's email address, because every part of the code is then a step that can fail — it can be mistyped, its capitalisation can be misread, it can be forwarded, and it can be posted in a group chat you have never heard of. When you know where someone is, the better instrument is a link that belongs only to them and works exactly once.

Everyone on your list gets their own invitation link. It carries the terms you set for them, so they never see a price you did not intend and never have to enter anything to prove they belong. The link works a single time. If it is forwarded, the forward is worth nothing once the first person has used it — which is a meaningfully different situation from a shared code, where the tenth forward is worth exactly as much as the first.

An invitation issues the ticket to the address it was sent to, not to whoever happens to open the link. This is what removes the need for a password, a sign-in step, or an account created before the event. It also settles the question of sharing honestly: a ticket that has been issued can be passed on, and no platform can truly prevent that. What matters is that it happens in the open — BrightStar already handles transfers as a first-class action, with the new holder recorded — rather than through an anonymous code that leaves you unable to say who was ever admitted.

Some of the list is not paying at all: presenters, their guests, the crew, the elders. Others are paying something: a sponsor rate, a volunteer rate, an alumni rate for everyone who came last year. An invitation carries either. A comp issues the ticket outright, so the recipient confirms and is done. A discounted invitation carries the reduced price into checkout with the terms already applied. The distinction is set per batch, so the presenters' list and the returning-attendees list can go out the same afternoon on entirely different terms.

Most of the people you want to invite are already known to you, so the list should not have to be assembled by hand. Three ways in. Everyone who has ever bought a ticket from you — the whole history, for the organizer who wants to bring their people back. The buyers from past events, chosen event by event: last year's festival, or the three winter retreats, or every gathering you have run at one venue. And a CSV, for the lists that live somewhere else — the presenter roster in a spreadsheet, the sponsor contacts from the partnerships folder, the volunteer sign-ups from a form.

Pick as many past events as you like and the lists are merged into one. Someone who came to all three of last year's retreats is one person on the result, not three — they are matched on email address and folded together before anything is sent, so nobody receives the same invitation twice and your count of who is being invited is a count of people rather than of tickets. The same folding happens across sources: an address that appears both in your CSV and in last year's buyer list is still one invitation.

You choose which ticket types each guest may reserve and how many of each, and those reservations come out of that ticket type's real inventory — not a separate guest allowance sitting alongside it. There is one venue and a limited number of places in it, and a presenter's partner occupies one exactly as a paying attendee does. Committing the seat at the moment you invite is the point: the guest list is decided before the on-sale pressure arrives, so you are never in the position of having sold the room out from under people you had already promised a place.

Everyone comped lands on the event's guest list the moment the batch goes out, each carrying one of three states. Invited — their place is held, their link is out, nothing has come back. Claimed — they have their ticket. Checked in — they walked through the door, which the scanner records without anyone doing anything extra. The states are marked so the list reads at a glance rather than requiring you to compare columns, and one figure sits above it: how many comped guests have not claimed yet. That number is the one worth watching, because it is the count of places being held for people who may not turn up.

The reminder schedule is drawn from how long is left before the event rather than from a fixed number of days after sending. One goes immediately, another a day later, then three or four more spaced evenly across whatever time remains. A retreat invited eight months out is nudged gently over months; a festival comped three weeks before doors gets the same number of reminders compressed into three weeks. Either way the last one lands while there is still time to act on it, and the whole sequence stops the moment someone claims — nobody is chased for something they have already done.

A batch reports what was sent, what has been opened, what has been claimed or redeemed, and what is still outstanding — and because no two people share an invitation, those numbers point at individuals rather than at a total. Three days before doors, the useful question is not how many invitations were issued but which forty people have not yet claimed theirs, so you can send a reminder to exactly those people and no one else. Where the invitation carried a discount rather than a full comp, the batch also reports what those redemptions actually brought in, which is the number that tells you whether a sponsor rate or an alumni rate was worth offering at the price you set.