Event Roles: Defining the People Every Event Needs

An event role is a named part an event needs filled by a person or company, such as Project manager, Production manager, Client, or Venue. Roles live in an organization-wide role library, so a role you define once can be placed on every event type that needs it. An organization admin manages the library under Settings › Events › Roles.

Placing a role on a type tells everyone working an event of that type which parts must be filled, and lets your organization attach process to who fills them.

How roles differ from attributes

Adding someone to an event as crew or as a collaborator says they are involved. Filling a role says what they are there to do. A project manager and a production manager might both be crew on the same event, but the roles make clear which one is which, so the team knows who to go to for what.

Roles also do more than label people. Because each role is a defined part of the event, your organization can build process around it:

• Effects can require a role, track it as a task, or fill it. They can also pull the people in a role onto the event, make them participants in an activity, or send them a notification.
• A tracked item can name a role as its default assignee, so whoever fills that role on an event is assigned the task.
• A base template input can be filled from a role on the type.

A person attribute, such as a Collaborator or Crew Member attribute, also records a person or company on an event. Use an attribute when you only need to tag who is responsible for, or connected to, something, such as tagging the venue. Use a role when you need the extra things roles bring: a labeled purpose on the event and actions that follow from it. Choose by the functions you need. See Event Attributes for the person attribute types.

Create a role

You can also create a role from inside the type editor while placing items in a section. Choose Create new role, and the new role is added to the library and placed in that section in one step.

Use Several people for parts that more than one person shares on an event, such as labor managers on a large production. Use One person for parts with a single owner, such as the project manager.

Limit who can fill a role

By default, a role offers the whole roster: All crew for a role filled by crew members, or All collaborators for one filled by collaborators. Some roles should only be filled by certain people. A Production manager role, for example, might only make sense for the handful of crew members who run productions.

To narrow the list, open the role and select Options. Choose the crew members or collaborators who should be offered, then go back to the form and save. Leave nothing selected to offer the whole roster again. The Options column on the Roles tab shows which roles are limited.

Options shape the picker only. Changing them never removes someone who already fills the role on an event.

Place a role on an event type

Roles are placed into a type's sections the same way attributes are, and they share one order with the attributes in that section. Many organizations keep every role in a single section, such as Staff, so the team sees all of an event's people in one place.

A placed role carries the same Required, Tracked, and Review settings as an attribute. A required role must be filled before an event of this type can be created. A tracked role becomes a task until someone fills it, so an unfilled project manager shows up as work instead of being missed. Placing and configuring items is covered in Setting Up an Event Type.

Rename, delete, and restore a role

Open a role from the Roles tab to rename it or change its Options. Filled by and How many stay as they were set.

To remove a role, open its row menu on the Roles tab and choose Delete. If the role is placed on any event type, or is filled on any event, it is archived instead of deleted, so no event loses who filled it. An archived role is no longer offered when you place roles on a type. If the role is not used anywhere, it is deleted.

Turn on Show archived to see archived roles, then choose Restore from an archived role's row menu to bring it back.