Venue sourcing: your library, your shortlist, your decision

Where it lives

Open the event and look for the Venue card on the Overview tab. It shows the selected venue once there is one, honest progress until then (“3 candidates · 1 quote in”), and a link to the sourcing page. The event is the way in — there is no venues item in the navigation yet, and the library is managed right on the sourcing page.

The library is yours, and only yours

Every venue in the library was typed in by your team, and the library is private to your workspace. This is not a directory we supply and not a network venues join. No such thing exists here.

Adding a venue takes a name, plus a city if you have one, and it lands in the library and on the current event’s shortlist in one step. Capacity (seated and standing), an indicative rental band, amenity tags, a website, an address, and a contact can be filled in any time — and the more of those you record, the more the filters below have to work with.

Filters, not matchmaking

The requirements strip at the top — audience size, a budget ceiling, must-have amenities, a text search — filters the list, and only filters it. Changing these numbers never edits the event, and the budget figure is never saved anywhere.

What a venue shows is its own recorded facts: “Seats 400,” “Band $8k–$12k,” its tags. When a filter is on, each venue says which fact passed or failed it, in its own data — “Not tagged: parking” rather than an adjective. There is no score and no percentage, because an “87% match” over a list of venues you typed in yourself would be theater.

One rule worth knowing: unknown never passes. A venue with no recorded capacity does not clear a capacity filter — it is set aside, wearing a “capacity not recorded” chip, so absence can never read as adequacy. And the list’s order is labeled right on the page: “Ordered by how much is recorded, then by name.” Not by relevance, because nothing here computes relevance.

Availability is what the call is for

We do not hold venue calendars, and we will not pretend to. Whether a room is free on your date is exactly what the first email or phone call finds out, which is why the shortlist’s next status after Shortlisted is Contacted.

The shortlist: statuses of what you know

Each candidate carries a status, and every status records planner knowledge, never system activity. Shortlisted: on the list, nobody contacted yet. Contacted: you reached out, from your own email. Quote received: they gave you a number. Declined: they said no, or the date is gone. Rejected: you said no.

Each candidate also holds the quoted amount and what it covers, the date you last contacted them, a next follow-up date, and decision notes for the record. If a venue’s record includes a contact email, an “Email venue” button opens a message in your own mail app with the subject filled in. It sends from your address or not at all — the app never contacts a venue on your behalf.

The decision: one selected venue

Selecting a venue marks the decision, and an event can have exactly one — enforced by the database, not just the screen. If a different venue was already selected, the product tells you first what will happen to it: it moves back to the highest status its own record supports. A quote on file goes back to Quote received, a contact date to Contacted, otherwise Shortlisted. Nothing is ever relabeled to a status nobody recorded.

After you select, the product offers — and only offers — to set the event’s location to the venue’s name and city. That field feeds FlowGenius and the exports, so the offer says exactly what it would replace before it replaces anything. Confirm it, or keep the location as it is. A location you typed by hand is never overwritten without you pressing the button.

Who sees what

Any seat that can open the event can read its shortlist and its decision. Venue contact people — their names, emails, and phone numbers — are visible to admins and editors only, and so is the library itself: a view-only seat sees this event’s candidates, not your workspace’s venue book.

Deleting a venue does not rewrite history

Delete a venue from the library and any shortlist it was on keeps the record under the venue’s name, marked as no longer in the library. What an event considered and chose survives your cleanup.

What this is not

No venue directory, no venue network, no availability data, no maps, and no messages sent by us to anyone. There is also no workspace-wide venue page yet — the library lives on each event’s sourcing page for now. Whether and when any of that changes stays planetevents.io/roadmap’s question.