This year’s UNC Campout, scheduled to take place Jan. 16, will do so with a budget of half of what the 2008 Campout had.

Morgan Donnelly, chair of the Student Senate Campus Community Committee and junior in political science, said the reduced budget has impacted planning for the event.

“I think it was budget-related,” Donnelly said. “I don’t think anyone really knows why. One thing is that Student Government has more programs going on.”

The 2008-2009 Campout’s budget is $1,000.

Donnelly said despite the impact of the budget being cut in half that the Campus Community Committee is still trying to make sure the event is fun for students.

“We want Campout to be student driven and benefit the outside community as well as the N.C. State community,” she said. “It’s not just campers being involved. It’s the whole N.C. State community and the Raleigh community.”

Adam Compton, senior class president and agricultural business mangement major, said another goal of this year’s Campout is the way students will receive tickets and check-in throuhgout the night.

Compton said Campout volunteers will use scanners to scan student IDs.

“We’re going to use scanners to scan student ids,” he said. “But we don’t know yet how to figure out how coordinate that with a computer. There is not a computer program that can do what we want it to.”

Compton said the size of Campout makes it difficult to centralize how students are kept up with throughout the night.

“There are so many people out there,” Compton said. “Last year we checked names off manually on a list. We’re trying to make it easier.”

Donnelly said the Campout will include a blood mobile for students to give blood and potentially a battle of the bands for student bands.

“We’re having the blood mobile out there and a lot of philanthropic evetns,” she said. “We’d like to have maybe eight student bands for a battle of the bands. We want diversity.”

Donnelly also said CampusRec will be involved, sponsoring different games throughout the night.

“CampusRec is going to be out there having structured bracket evets like ball toss and cornhole,” she said. “Also, there will be a special surprise in the morning.”

Lauren Miller, a sophomore in aerospace engineering, said last year’s Campout provided a fun night for students but also said the changes to the year’s events seemed positive.

“They had a lot of activities that I thought were really cool,” Miller said of last year. “But the battle of the bands and the bracket games sounds good.”

Students will not be able to receive T-shirts at this year’s event. Donnelly attributed this to the reduced budget.

“We’re not going to do T-shirts because of budget purposes,” she said. “We can’t gaurantee everyone a T-shirt.”

The registration process for students, set to begin after Christmas break, will allow groups to sign up in a lottery for campsites.

Once students sign up, the groups will be ranked according to the average of their loyalty points and assigned campsites based on their point average.

“It’s going to be the same way we do the lottery system,” Donnelly said. “You put yourself in a lottery to have a campsite and then the loyalty point average of each group will determine if they get a campsite.”

Miller said she thought rewarding groups with high loyalty point averages is a good way to give out tickets.

“It’s kind of hard, but that is the best way to do it because it shows who atually goes to games,” Miller said. “It doesn’t reward people who just go to the Carolina game.”

Once the number of people at Campout reaches 2,193, the number of tickets available to be handed out, volunteers will not allow more registrants to sign up.

Miller said the Campout is a great way for students to have fun and receive tickets to the rivalry game with UNC-Chapel Hill.

“We got really tickets last year so it was definitely worth it,” she said.