SBID Awards 2024 — Guest Management Platform
A custom platform enabling guests to submit dietary requirements and book tables for the SBID Awards 2024 gala night — replacing manual processes and simplifying back-office operations for the industry's leading interior design awards.
The Challenge
SBID Awards is the global interior design industry’s premier event, organised by the Society of British & International Interior Design. Managing guest logistics for a large awards gala involves real operational complexity: dietary requirements from hundreds of guests, table allocation across a formal venue, back-office coordination for the events team, and the inevitable last-minute changes.
SBID was handling this manually through a spreadsheet — a process that consumed significant staff time and was prone to errors. They needed a custom platform that could absorb the complexity and surface clean, actionable data for the operations team.
The Approach
We designed and built the guest management platform for the 2024 Awards night. Key work included:
- Building the guest-facing interface for dietary requirement submission — simple enough that guests would actually complete it
- Table booking workflow with capacity management and allocation tracking
- Back-office views for the SBID events team showing real-time dietary counts, table status, and guest lists
- Export functionality producing clean, formatted output compatible with the events team’s existing workflows (Excel, CSV)
- File processing pipeline for managing guest data across the invitation and RSVP lifecycle
- Deployed on Google Cloud Platform with appropriate data handling for a commercial event
The design priority was operational simplicity for the SBID team — every decision was made to reduce the number of emails, calls, and manual checks needed in the run-up to the event.
The Outcome
- Custom platform deployed for SBID Awards 2024 gala
- Dietary requirements and table bookings managed entirely through the platform
- Back-office workload reduced significantly versus previous manual process
- Clean data exports for catering and venue coordination
- Events team equipped with real-time visibility of guest status throughout the run-up
Technologies & Methods
Ruby on Rails, Google Cloud Platform, dietary requirement workflow management, table allocation logic, Excel-compatible file processing, events operations tooling.
About this engagement
This was a Build engagement: a targeted custom tool solving a specific operational problem for an event with a hard deadline. The measure of success was whether the SBID team had a smoother night — and they did.