Well, there's this thing you can do for animating lots of stuff. Once, Wilson used it for the vikings running into the Bank from How to Not Rob a Bank.  What you do, is you make a list of sorts with check marks for moving these certain things.
Obviously, managing a list would make it more time consuming, but you would probably be able to actually move them correctly at least.

Also, if you can, having an assistant to help with this list would be optimal.

I would do it with grid paper, on the top row have a symbol for each object, and on the side row have numbers for each frame, and each time you move someone, you check off the square for that parson and frame, then move on to the next row once the frame is completed.

I've done quite a lot of crowd animations in my latest film, and I find the best thing to do is to work out what each figure is doing, then animate systematically (left/right or up/down).  You really just need patience more than anything else.

PITCH Part 1 Out Now!
Part 2 Coming Soon

I once tried animating a shot where about 15/20 minifigs appeared on screen at the same time: what I did was to divide the set in groups of people and studied their walk cycles, so that I knew that if minifig n° 1 was in position 3, then minifig n° 2 had to be two positions ahead of that.
It came out ok, I guess.