Event Types: Defining Each Kind of Job Your Team Runs

An event type is your organization's definition of a kind of job: what an event of that kind collects, what it tracks, and what it is built from.

Most companies run more than one kind of job. A production company might do full productions, equipment rentals, retail sales, and labor-only calls. A corporate team might run conferences and incentive travel. An agency might split its work into corporate events, festivals, and activations. Each of those jobs needs different information, different people, and a different amount of work, and treating them all the same way creates noise on every one of them.

Why Event Types Matter

Before event types, teams made a custom property just to record what kind of job an event was. Then they added a property for everything any job might need. A rental ended up carrying fields for rigging, technical drawings, and labor managers that only a full production uses, and most of those fields sat blank. Every event looked cluttered, and nobody could tell at a glance which empty fields actually mattered.

Different kinds of jobs genuinely need different things. A full production needs crew, a venue, rigging, technical drawings, a production manager, and labor managers. A rental is a pickup and a drop-off, or a dry rental where the client collects the gear themselves. It needs far fewer questions, far fewer tasks, and usually just one role: the person picking up.

Event types let each kind of job carry exactly what it needs. Your organization decides once, per type, which fields an event captures, which people it needs, which details must be filled in and reviewed, and which template it starts from. Every event of that type is then described the same way, so the team always knows what is expected and what is still missing.

Event types also give event-wide data a clear home, separate from what you collect through advancing:

If you ever found yourself making an advance just to hold the venue or the load-in date, that data belongs on the event's type instead.

How Event Types Work

Event types are built from two shared libraries that an organization admin maintains, and a set of definitions on each type.

Attributes are typed fields that describe the whole event, such as a ship date, a dress code, a venue, or a client. Roles are the named parts an event needs filled by a person, such as Project manager, Production manager, or Client. Both live in organization-wide libraries, so an attribute or role defined once can be reused on every type that needs it.

A type arranges attributes and roles into sections, grouped by what the data is about: Staff, Venue details, Attire, or Dates and times. For each attribute or role it places, the type decides whether it is Required, whether it is Tracked as a task until it is filled, and whether changes to it need Review before they count as done. The reviewer is chosen on each event. Tracked items can also carry a default due date and a default assignee.

Beyond its sections, a type can define three more things:

• An intake form: internal questions answered by whoever creates the event, such as an account manager, sales manager, or project manager. It is not sent to clients.
• A base template: the template that events of this type are built from, with its inputs filled from the type's attributes and roles.
• Effects: rules that act on the event when conditions are met, such as notifying a department when an intake answer says a project manager is needed, or adding the event's dates to the schedule.

An event gets its type when it is created, or later from its settings. The type's sections then appear on the event's profile, and your team fills in the values there. Intake answers are kept with the intake form they were given on. They reach the event's attributes and roles only through effects that fill them in. If an event's type changes later, the values already filled in are kept, and the intake answers stay with the original form.