3,000 students, a treehouse stage and an NZ$17,000 profit.

The Tea Party is the UCSA’s long-running end-of-lectures festival. On 12 October 2012, at the end of a tough year for Christchurch and the university, 3,000 students in costume marked the end of the academic year with a full day of live music and food trucks.

As Activities and Events Manager at the UCSA, I programmed the line-up and ran the event: the logistics, the marketing and communications, and the stakeholders. Ruby Frost, P Money, Clap Clap Riot, Von Voin Strum, Local Remedy, The Possums, and Fletch and Vaughan were on the bill. And yes, there was a treehouse stage.

The Tea Party was budgeted as a NZ$70,000 spend. Through tight cost management and new partnerships, it returned a NZ$17,000 profit instead: an NZ$87,000 turnaround the UCSA put back into other events and programmes. And the police liquor-licensing lead called our bar-queuing system the best he’d seen. The alcohol management framework we built for the day went on to become the Canterbury benchmark.