Adding Collaborators and Crew to Your Event
How to add the companies, vendors and teams working your event as collaborators, structure them by event size, and add the crew members inside each one.
Events are built by many groups working together. Collaborators are how BackOps represents those groups, and crew are the individual people within them.
Getting your collaborators and crew set up early gives you a complete picture of who's involved in the event and lays the foundation for how work, files, and communication get organized throughout the platform.
What Is a Collaborator?
A collaborator represents a group of people: a company, a vendor, a department, an artist's team, a client, or any other collection of individuals that plays a role in the event.
Collaborators are intentionally broad. BackOps does not impose fixed roles like "vendor" or "sponsor"; a collaborator represents whatever group is actually involved in your event, and your organization can classify them with its own collaborator types, such as Venue or Vendor. In practice, this might include:
- Your own production company or internal team
- External vendors (audio, lighting, catering, power, tenting, logistics)
- A client or organizing body
- Artist or performer teams
- Speakers and their support staff
- A venue and its staff
When you created your event, BackOps set up your first collaborator, the default collaborator that represents your organization (or the template created your collaborators for you). Add more from the event sidebar: open the Collaborators group, choose Manage Collaborators, and click Add collaborator. If your organization keeps a collaborator database, Add collaborator also offers From org library, which brings in a company you have worked with before instead of retyping it.
How to Structure Your Collaborators
How you break down collaborators depends on the size and complexity of your event.
For smaller events, the simplest approach is one collaborator per company or group.
- Your production company
- Each vendor (catering, A/V, etc.)
- Your client
- Any speakers or performers
This keeps things clean and easy to navigate without over-engineering the structure.
Adding Crew Members
Under each collaborator you add crew members: the individual people who belong to that group. Open the collaborator from the sidebar, go to its Crew tab, and click Add crew. Event admins can also add crew from the event-wide Crew page.
For each crew member you can store:
- First and last name
- Email and phone
- Whether they are a point of contact for the event
- Crew types and their custom attributes
- A title, which you can add from the crew member's record once they exist
Adding a crew member does not have to invite them. Leave the Account email empty and the person is added as a contact: a record of who is working the show that can be scheduled, assigned work and listed as a point of contact, even if they never sign in. Fill in the account email when you do want to give them access, and BackOps sends the invitation. See What's next for inviting someone later.
Add crew members even for contacts you don't plan to invite into the platform. Keeping contact information in BackOps, rather than across email threads and spreadsheets, makes it much easier to manage throughout the event.
Custom Attributes
The default crew fields cover the basics, but every event has its own information needs. Crew types and their attributes let you extend what you collect about crew members, for example t-shirt sizes, dietary restrictions, certifications or accommodation preferences.
An event's crew types and attributes live under the event's settings, in Crewing, and your organization can keep its own set for its crew database. An attribute appears on a crew member once they have a type that includes it.
See the Crew documentation for a full walkthrough.
Next: Areas
Learn how to define the physical spaces of your event.