Areas: Dividing an Event into the Spaces Where Work Happens

An area is one of the spaces that make up an event: a stage, a breakout room, front of house, catering, a production office. Areas let your team plan, read, and hand off one part of the event at a time.

Big events stop fitting in one view. The master schedule runs to hundreds of lines, the files folder fills with floor plans for every room, and the stage manager for Stage B has to dig through everything to find what concerns their stage. The information exists, but nobody can see their part of it.

Why Areas Matter

Splitting an event into areas gives every space its own view. The stage manager opens Stage B and sees Stage B's schedule, the advances that apply to it, the gear assigned to it, and its files, without the noise of everything else. The production manager still sees the whole event, because areas are a way of organizing the event's information, not a separate copy of it.

Areas also make handoffs cleaner. A printable day sheet for an area collects its schedule and every advance for it in one document, ready to hand to whoever runs that space on the day.

The best area lists cover both sides of the event. Attendee-facing spaces such as stages, session rooms, and VIP lounges are easy to remember. Back-of-house spaces such as green rooms, production offices, crew catering, and loading docks have schedules, files, and needs of their own, and are just as worth modeling.

How Areas Work

flowchart TD
  E[Event] --> A1[Main Stage]
  E --> A2[Green Room]
  E --> A3[Catering]
  A1 --- S[Activities]
  A1 --- AD[Advances]
  A1 --- R[Resources]
  A1 --- F[Files]

Areas belong to one event and form a flat list: an area cannot contain other areas, so "stage left" and "stage right" are two areas of their own rather than children of a stage.

Several kinds of work can be tied to an area:

• Activities on the schedule, so one area's schedule can be viewed on its own.
• Advances, which say which area they apply to, with their answers and requests.
• Resources and procurement assigned to the area.
• Files kept in the area's own folder.

Each area also has its own permissions, so access can be limited to the areas someone works in.

Areas are not the same as locations. A location is a real place your organization saves and reuses across events, such as a venue or a warehouse. An area is a space inside one event. An event at the Riverside Amphitheater (its location) might have Main Stage, Box Office, and Artist Village as its areas.

Event templates can create a standard set of areas on every new event, so a festival type always starts with its stages in place.