Awards night run of show template
Rehearsal through to carriages, with the awards split across the courses the way they actually run. Change a block and the rest of the night re-flows. Arrival stays pinned to the invitation.
Your awards night run of show
Share whole editable version with anyone
One link carries the whole run of show, and whoever opens it gets their own copy. The florist adds their install window, the caterer their service times, and you retype none of it.
- No sign-up, no app to download.
- A QR code on the printed sheet, so paper hands itself on.
- The data is contained in the link. Nothing is uploaded or stored.
| Start | Length | Item | Who |
|---|
Built free at 1pm.app/tools/run-of-show Take it further
Print it, save it, or move it into 1pm to share it live with your crew and suppliers.
Copied. Three steps to have it live:
- Start a free 1pm trial, no card needed.
- Create your event and edit the event portal.
- Choose Paste in and paste. Every row lands with its time and length.
Add a row with a name on it first, then there will be something to copy.
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The awards night run of show in full
Starting at 16:00 it finishes at 00:50 the next morning, a span of 8h 50. Change one length and every row below it moves.
| Start | Length | Item | Who |
|---|---|---|---|
| 16:00 | 1h 15 | Supplier access, room set and dress | Venue |
| 17:15 | 30 min | AV, sound and screen check | AV |
| 17:45 | 20 min | Presenter rehearsal and autocue check | Production |
| 18:05 | 10 min | Trophies staged, running order to the lectern | Production |
| 18:30 pinned | 45 min | Guest arrival, arrival drinks | Front of house |
| 19:15 | 15 min | Guests seated | Venue |
| 19:30 | 10 min | Host welcome | MC |
| 19:40 | 30 min | Entrée served | Kitchen |
| 20:10 | 30 min | Awards, first block | MC |
| 20:40 | 40 min | Main course served | Kitchen |
| 21:20 | 30 min | Awards, second block | MC |
| 21:50 | 25 min | Dessert and coffee | Kitchen |
| 22:15 | 15 min | Top award and acceptance speech | MC |
| 22:30 | 20 min | Winners photographed with trophies | Photographer |
| 22:50 | 1h 30 | Dancing | DJ |
| 00:20 | 30 min | Carriages | Front of house |
Why "Guest arrival, arrival drinks" is pinned. Guest arrival is pinned to 6.30pm, the one time on the invitation. The room set, the sound check and the presenter rehearsal above it arrive with fifteen minutes to spare, which is the whole contingency for the evening.
The running time is always longer than the running order
Awards nights overrun more reliably than any other event format, and the reason is arithmetic rather than bad luck. A category on paper is a line of text. A category on the night is a presenter walking on, a video package, four nominees read out, a winner crossing a room, a handshake, a photograph and a thank you. Two minutes, not thirty seconds.
Multiply that by eighteen categories and the gap between the plan and the evening is twenty five minutes, which arrives in the middle of dessert service. So put the real length against each block in this template rather than the optimistic one, and let the sheet tell you what time the night actually finishes. That number is the whole point of writing it down.
Where awards nights go wrong
- Acceptance speeches with no limit. Decide in advance whether winners speak. If they do, brief them on a length before the night and hold the line from the lectern. An unbriefed room will average well over a minute each.
- Trophies in the wrong order. Somebody has to lay them out in running order behind the lectern, and it is a job with a name on it. Handing a presenter the wrong award is the one mistake an audience remembers.
- Service and stage fighting each other. Kitchen cannot serve while the room is watching a screen. Alternate deliberately, and tell the kitchen which block they are clearing under.
- No spare in front of the doors. The rehearsal is the first thing dropped when the room set runs late, and it is the thing whose absence costs you half an hour later. The pin on this template shows you the slack you actually have.
- Nobody owns the music and the screens. Walk-on music, video packages and the holding slide are all cues, and cues need an owner on the sheet.
Why the times move on their own
This tool stores how long each thing takes rather than what time it starts, and works the clock out from the top. Add five minutes to the first award block and everything after it shifts by five. Guest arrival is pinned to half past six, so it holds no matter what happens above it, and the sheet shows you the slack in front of it as a number rather than leaving you to find out during the sound check.
Related starting points: the charity gala run of show if there is fundraising in the evening, the conference run of show if the awards sit at the end of a conference day, or the run of show template and builder to start from nothing.
Common questions
Split the awards into two or three blocks and put a course between them. A single run of twenty categories loses the room somewhere around the eighth, and it also gives the kitchen an impossible service window. Two blocks of six to eight, with mains between them and the headline award after dessert, keeps attention up and lets food come out while nobody is on stage.
Between ninety seconds and two minutes per category once you count the presenter walking on, the nominees being read, the winner reaching the stage and a short thank you. Ten categories is therefore closer to twenty five minutes than fifteen. If you are allowing acceptance speeches, budget two and a half minutes per award and brief the winners on a time limit before the night, not from the stage.
Yes, and it is on this template as its own row. Twenty minutes covers the walk on and off, where to stand for the photograph, how the autocue advances and what happens when an envelope is wrong. It is the cheapest twenty minutes in the whole evening: every awards night that runs badly late is late because presenters are working out the stage in front of an audience.
In a dedicated block after the last award rather than one at a time on stage. Photographing each winner as they collect adds a minute per category to the running time and produces the same photograph twenty times. A twenty minute block afterwards, in a set corner with the trophies, gets better pictures and gives you the ceremony back.
Yes. Download CSV writes the running order as a spreadsheet with the start times already cascaded and lengths in minutes, so you can total an award block and see whether it fits. It opens directly in Excel or Google Sheets, which is usually what the venue, the AV supplier and the production team want to be sent. Save to a file is the separate button for a .json that reopens here; the CSV is a one-way trip.
Yes, and that is most of what it gets used for. Internal awards, sales kick-offs, club presentation nights and industry awards all share this shape: a rehearsal, an arrival pinned to the invitation, dinner service interleaved with presentation blocks, and a headline award at the end. Load it, cut what you do not need, and rename the rest.
One event, or every event
This builder does one sheet for one day. If you are planning a one-off, that is genuinely all you need and you should use it. If you run events for a living, the run of show is the last hour of a job that started with a lead weeks earlier, and the sheet on its own cannot hold the rest of it.
This free builder
One-off eventsA good document, and only a document. Nothing to sign up for, nothing stored.
- One event at a time, and no record of the last one.
- Saved in this browser only, so a new device starts empty.
- The link hands over a copy, so your later edits never reach it.
- Print, PDF or CSV, and then the document is on its own.
1pm
Event pros and venuesThe system of record for the whole operation, with the live run of show at the centre of it.
- Leads. A lead form on your own site, every reply in one inbox, nothing lost in a personal mailbox.
- Quotes and confirmations. Send a priced quote, the client accepts and signs it online, and the event is created from it.
- Live run of show. The sheet you just built, shared for real: crew, suppliers and the client watch it update, each seeing only their own rows.
- BEOs for every department. Service style, setup, pax, dietaries, access and vacate, on one brief the kitchen, AV and duty manager can all work from.
- Spaces and capacity. Rooms with their own addresses, access notes and limits, and a hard block on double-booking one twice.
- Menus and food costing. Priced menus, dietary tracking, and recipe and portion costing so you know the margin before you quote it.
- Invoices and payments. Deposits, balances, card payment online, and a one-way sync into Xero when the money lands.
- Contacts, crew, tasks and reporting. Every event you have ever run, searchable, with the people and the numbers attached to it.
If you are an event pro
Planners, caterers, photographers, AV and celebrants run every client job in 1pm end to end: the lead, the quote, the signed confirmation, the run of show and the final invoice, on one record per job instead of five tools and a spreadsheet.
If you are a venue
Hotels, restaurants and event spaces get the function diary, the BEO each department works from, covers and pax, access and vacate, and a kitchen reading the same event the sales team sold, without printing a thing.
Move this run of show into 1pm
Copy to clipboard above takes the whole sheet across in one paste, times, lengths and owners intact. 30 days free, no card, and nothing to install for the people you share it with.