Setting up your first event
Create the event, link the venue, draw a geofence around the building — a circle for open ground, a traced polygon for anything else — set the capacity the room is supposed to hold, and mark your staff as crew. Include the queueing area in the boundary; that is the step people most often get wrong.
Before the steps: the two things people get wrong
Both are set once, days beforehand, and neither announces itself until the night. Worth thirty seconds now.
- A boundary that stops at the door. Everyone queueing outside is holding a phone that reports as outside your venue. They have arrived; they should be counted.
- A circle around a building that is not round. A circle big enough to cover a long, narrow venue also covers the businesses on either side of it, and their customers' phones.
The steps
1. Create the event
Name, date, start and end time. The times matter more than they look: they bound the window in which check-in is accepted. Set them to when the doors open and close, not when the headline act starts.
2. Link or add the venue
If the building is already on Blend'n, link it — you inherit its address and, usefully, its historical median entry rate, which is what the live view compares tonight's arrivals against. If it is not, add it once and it is there for next time.
3. Draw the geofence
This is the boundary a check-in is validated against, and it is what makes attendance a fact rather than an RSVP.
| Shape | Use it when |
|---|---|
| Circle | Open or roughly round ground with space around it — a field, a courtyard, a car park. Fast to set up. |
| Polygon | An L-shaped or long, thin building, a unit sharing a wall with a neighbour, or anywhere a circle would spill onto someone else's premises. Takes longer and is worth it. |
Either way, extend the boundary past the entrance by roughly 20–50 metres to take in the queue. There is more on the trade-off in the geofencing guide, including why the device's own reported accuracy matters more than the shape you pick.
An RSVP is a promise. A check-in inside the fence is a fact.
4. Set the capacity
What the room is supposed to hold. Blend'n reports against this number and shows you when the room goes past it — it never blocks a check-in. See why blocking would make the count worse.
5. Mark your crew
Flag your staff as crew. They then count towards occupancy, because a safety headcount counts bodies, and not towards attendance, because they are not guests. Skip this and a twelve-person crew inflates your attendance by twelve.
Then what
Nothing else is required. Attendees who check in join the event chatroom automatically, and the live view is populated from the moment the first person arrives — see During the event.
Common questions
- Should I use a circle or a polygon for the geofence?
- Use a circle for an open, roughly round space such as a field or a courtyard. Use a polygon for anything L-shaped, long and thin, or sharing a wall with a neighbouring business, because a circle wide enough to cover the building will also cover them.
- Should the geofence include the queue outside?
- Yes. People queueing have arrived and should be counted, and a boundary that stops at the door means the phones held by everyone waiting outside fall outside it. A buffer of roughly 20 to 50 metres beyond the entrance is usually right.
- What happens when the room reaches the capacity I set?
- Blend'n shows you that the room is at or over its stated number. It does not refuse anyone's check-in, because the geofence covers the queue outside and rejecting someone there would remove them from your attendance record entirely.
- Why mark someone as crew?
- Crew count towards occupancy but not attendance. Occupancy is a safety headcount, which counts bodies regardless of job title; attendance measures how many guests came. Without the distinction a twelve-person crew inflates your attendance figure by twelve.
Last reviewed August 2026. If something here stops being true, it is a bug — tell us.
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