Crew in BackOps

A crew member is one person working an event: a stage manager, a hotel's on-site contact, a freelance rigger, a client's producer. Every event runs on dozens or hundreds of these people, and most of what goes wrong on show day traces back to not knowing who someone is, how to reach them, or whether they have what they need.

Crew gives each of those people a record of their own, tied to the company or team they work for, and separate from whether they ever log in to BackOps.

Why Crew Matters

Contact sheets, certification spreadsheets and "who's our person at the venue?" emails all describe the same people, and none of them agree for long. A freelancer's union card lives in one file, their phone number in another, and their access to the event in a third system. When the show changes, every copy has to be chased.

Crew keeps one record per person per event. You can assign them tasks, put them on the schedule, list them as a point of contact, and collect the details your team needs from them, all in the place where the rest of the event is planned. And because your organization keeps its own crew database, the people you work with again and again do not have to be typed in for every show.

How Crew Works

Crew belong to collaborators. On an event, every crew member belongs to exactly one collaborator, the company or team they work for. The hotel has its on-site contacts, the catering vendor has its staff, and your own organization is a collaborator too.

Being on the crew is not the same as having access. A person added as a contact is just a record: they can be assigned work and scheduled, and they never receive an email. Giving someone access is a separate, deliberate step that sends an invitation (or connects an account they already have) with the permissions and license you choose. A crew list shows each person's account as Active, Pending (invited but not signed up yet) or empty for a contact.

Crew types shape what you collect. Your organization defines crew types such as Employee, Freelancer or Volunteer, each with sections of custom attributes: certifications, shirt size, dietary needs, union status. For each attribute you decide whether it is required and whether the crew member can see and edit it. A person can hold several types at once.

The organization keeps the reusable record. The organization's crew database holds the people you work with across events. From an event you can pull someone down from the organization, refresh them later, or push what you learned on the event back up.

flowchart LR
    subgraph Org["Organization"]
        DB["Crew database"]
    end
    subgraph Event["Event"]
        C["Collaborator"] --> M["Crew member"]
    end
    DB -->|"Pull from org"| M
    M -->|"Push to org"| DB
    M -.->|"Invite (optional)"| A["BackOps account"]

Where Crew Lives

• The event Crew page lists everyone across all collaborators, with filters and saved views. It is for event admins.
• Each collaborator's Crew tab lists just that collaborator's people, for anyone with Manage Crew on it.
• The event Contacts page, opened from the Dashboard, lists the crew marked as a point of contact.
• The organization's Crew page holds the crew database.