Say once what a night at your place needs — a lead, two ushers, a bar. Every date works it out from there. Requirements are read off the organization each time, never copied onto the event, so a rule you write in March applies to the show you add in October without anyone reopening it.
Set up once, then it runs per date
AV Lead, Usher, Bartender. Each carries its own colour, department, setup and teardown minutes, an optional role restriction and an auto-approve rule.
One list, at organization level: what every night needs. Any single event can tick out of a requirement it does not need. Nothing is opt-in, so a date nobody has opened still inherits the rules.
Add a date and the slots are already there, sized from the event window plus that type's call-time buffer. Deactivate a rule and the empty shifts it opened are withdrawn again.
A manager assigns someone, a coordinator invites and they RSVP, or a volunteer claims an open shift for themselves. All three end up in the same place.
Nobody's shift starts when the show starts. Setup and teardown minutes sit on the shift type, so the AV lead's call is load-in and the usher's is doors — computed from the event window, not typed in per night. The padding is spelled out on the shift and again in the calendar entry, so the crew can see why they are being asked to arrive early.
New organizations start with these defaults by category and tune each type from there.
A date with no start and end time cannot be staffed at all — the shift has nothing to be sized from, and assignment asks you to set the event times first.
Seeded buffers by category
A 7:00 PM show, staffed by an AV Lead
Different crews work differently. The rota does not care which route someone took.
Straight to a committed assignment, no RSVP round trip. Clicking twice adds nobody twice, and a manager's decision supersedes an invite already sitting unanswered. The person picker lists people with a working role — not everyone who has ever bought a ticket from you.
The invitation goes out by email and in-app, and by text to anyone who can receive one. They accept in the app, tap the link in the text, or reply YES or NO to the message. No login, no app to install. The email also carries a one-click add-to-Google-Calendar link so they can see the clash before answering.
Open shifts can be claimed from the Schedule page, from a sign-up page embedded on your own site, or from the mobile API. Where the claim lands depends on the claimant: a shift manager is approved on the spot, an auto-approve type is accepted, and everyone else waits at claimed while the managers get a notification.
A person who can no longer make a shift offers it up rather than dropping it, and a colleague takes it over. They can also propose a straight swap with somebody they name — one shift each, both moving together or neither moving at all. Whether the handover needs a manager's approval follows the same auto-approve setting on the shift type as a claim does.
An assignment is a small state machine. The map of legal moves is enforced in the record itself, not just hidden in the interface, so nothing reaches a state it should never have been in.
Every button that moves an assignment goes through one guarded path. Press approve twice and the second press does nothing. If another manager got there first, you get a line of text explaining it rather than an error page and a stale button.
A sweep every fifteen minutes closes anyone still checked in past their shift type's grace window, stamps the shift's end time and flags the row as auto-checked-out, so the hours report stays honest about which times were real. Types with no grace window set are left alone.
People record their own available and unavailable periods from their profile — one-off ranges, or a weekly pattern with a start and an end date. New entries arrive as requests. A manager approves or declines them from the Availability tab, and can also write somebody's time off on their behalf, which is approved as it is written.
Once approved, it is enforced. An invite or a self-claim that overlaps declared unavailability is refused outright. A manager assigning directly is not blocked, but is warned by name before it goes through — the override exists, it just is not silent.
Editing the times on an already-approved entry sends it back for review automatically. Approval is of specific dates, not of the person.
Availability — approvals queue
Priya N.
Unavailable · 14–22 March
Marcus D.
Unavailable · every Tuesday until 30 June
On the staff calendar as a genuine weekly repeat with an end date, not fifteen copies.
The same tab shows a 30, 60 or 90-day roster of who is away, so you can see the hole before you schedule into it.
Leads, double shows and moved dates are where most rotas quietly stop being true.
Tech lead and ops lead are ordinary shift types with two properties: they hold one person, and they approve on the spot. Naming a lead creates or reuses the lead shift, sized from load-in, so the lead appears on the rota, in the hours export and on the calendar like everyone else. If somebody already holds it, the existing lead stands.
Every organization starts with an AV Lead, AV Technician and AV Assistant already defined.
Two shifts of the same type, on the same day, no more than four hours apart, held by exactly the same people: they collapse into one covering shift. One entry, one set of hours, both events named on it. Notes from both survive, capacity becomes the larger of the two, and the window becomes the union.
A merge is refused far more often than it happens — a different crew on each side, or a gap long enough that the person genuinely went home. Each refusal records its reason, so silence never has to be interpreted.
Retime a date and the shifts covering it resize — but only the ones whose times still match what the system worked out last time. A call time somebody adjusted by hand is left as they set it, and a shift already finished or checked into is never rewritten, because those hours are payroll.
Reschedule to another day and committed assignments travel with it. Everyone affected is emailed, including anyone whose assignment could not be carried across. Nobody is dropped quietly.
The single most common reason a volunteer misses a shift is that it only ever existed inside somebody else's system.
They connect their Google account and tick one box in their profile. Venue Family creates a separate calendar in their account called Venue Family Assignments, backfills what they are already booked on, and keeps it current from then on. It is their calendar, on their phone, and they can hide it like any other. Turning the sync off removes the connection; the Google calendar itself stays where it is.
Only committed work appears: accepted, approved and checked-in assignments. An invitation they have not answered is not in there. Decline or cancel and the entry disappears again.
Three ushering shifts in one day is one block in their calendar, not three stacked notifications. Where two shifts are more than four hours apart — the same threshold the merge uses — it splits, because a matinee and an evening show should not black out the whole afternoon.
An admin can create a staff calendar for the organization carrying every person's shifts — each entry titled with their name — alongside approved time off. One shared crew schedule, separate from your public events calendar and your internal programming calendar. Both are covered on the event management page.
AV Lead @ Hamlet +1 more
Saturday 14 March · 6:00 PM – 11:30 PM
Hamlet (7:00 PM–10:00 PM)
Late Night Cabaret (10:30 PM–11:00 PM)
includes 60m setup, 30m teardown
Spare XLR run is in the loft.
…/my-shifts
Browsing and claiming open shifts is the widest permission in the product. Any approved member of your organization has it, staff role or not — that is what makes volunteering work.
The sign-up page embeds into your site. It lists your open volunteer shifts — event nights and standalone org days together — and someone with nothing but an account can sign up, see what they have taken and withdraw again. They do not need a role in your organization first. That is the point.
The same page is where they hand one back without leaving you short: offer a shift up for cover, pick up one somebody else has offered, or withdraw an offer they have changed their mind about. An offered shift stays theirs until another person takes it, so your roster never quietly empties out while a swap is in the air.
They can also apply properly: a short description, their skills, and years of experience. Your volunteer managers get the application, approve or revoke the volunteer badge, search the roster by skill and minimum experience, and send outreach messages to the people they find.
Skills and experience are searchable. They do not feed automatic suggestions when you are filling a shift — a person still picks the person.
Volunteer with us
Embedded on your own site
Usher — Hamlet
Sat 14 Mar · 6:45 PM – 10:15 PM · 1 of 3 filled
Build day
Org-wideSun 15 Mar · 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM · 4 of 6 filled
Or tell us about yourself
Including the one you should know about before you rely on it.
Email and in-app, plus a text to anyone with a number that can receive one. The email carries an add-to-calendar link. The text can be answered YES or NO.
A claim that needs a decision notifies the people who can actually make it — worked out from the permission itself, not a second copy of the role list. An accept or decline goes back to whoever sent the invite.
Offer a shift to somebody by name and they hear about it. Offer it to nobody in particular and nobody is emailed at all — it simply appears in the list of shifts needing cover, because mailing the whole organization every time somebody gives up a Tuesday is how people learn to mute the channel that also carries their shift reminders. Everything after that does notify. A swap waiting on a decision reaches the managers and the person who offered it; the handover landing reaches both sides. On a shift type that approves itself those are the same moment, so it is one message rather than two. And if nobody covers it before the shift starts, the offer closes and the person who made it is told — an offer that goes quiet is worse than no offer.
Everyone committed to a moved date is emailed the new time, including the people whose assignment could not be carried across.
An hourly job texts anyone whose shift starts within the next day. There is no email or in-app version of that reminder today, so somebody without a usable mobile number gets no reminder at all. If your crew is email-first, plan around it — and the calendar sync above is doing more work for you than the reminder is.
Automatic where the answer is unambiguous. A flag on your dashboard where it is not. We would rather leave a decision visible than guess it.
| The situation | What happens |
|---|---|
| A requirement naming one acceptable shift type | The shift opens itself on every date the rule applies to |
| A requirement naming two or more acceptable types | Never auto-filled. It stays on the dashboard as unmet until a person picks which one |
| A date with no start and end time | Nothing opens, and assignment asks you to set the event times first |
| A claim on an auto-approve shift type | Accepted immediately, nobody has to look at it |
| Any other claim | Held at claimed; the managers are notified and one of them decides |
| Somebody covers an offered shift of an auto-approve type | Changes hands on the spot — one person off, the other on, in a single move that either lands whole or not at all |
| Somebody covers an offered shift of any other type | Waits for a manager. Until they decide, the shift still belongs to the person who offered it, so nothing is left uncovered in the meantime |
| A trade between two shifts of different types | Takes the stricter of the two — one supervised type means the whole trade waits |
| An offer nobody takes before the shift starts | Closed, and the person who offered it is told — the shift was theirs all along and still is |
| An invite or a claim over approved time off | Refused |
| A manager assigning directly over the same time off | Allowed, with the conflict named on screen first |
| Two same-type shifts, same day, same crew, four hours or less apart | Merged into one covering shift |
| The same pair with different people, or a longer gap | Left alone, and the reason for declining is recorded |
| A rule you deactivate, delete or opt an event out of | Its empty shifts are withdrawn — but never one somebody has claimed, and never one a person created by hand |
Shifts, shift types, staffing requirements, availability, volunteer sign-up, shift swapping, pay rates and calendar sync are part of the platform on every plan. None of it is an add-on and none of it is metered.
One exception worth naming: the Tech dashboard — AV lead self-join and the AV crew coverage panel — needs the Medium plan or above. Everything else on this page does not.
Tell us how your nights are staffed and we will show you what the first month looks like once the rules are written down.