1.2 · The org chart: who you actually need
The big idea: an org chart is not a list of people, it is a list of functions that have to be owned. At your scale there are nine of them, one person is allowed to own three, and the only answer that fails is a function with nobody’s name next to it.
The analogy
Section titled “The analogy”Look at the crew list on any call sheet. It is not sorted by person, it is sorted by department. Camera, sound, grip and electric, art, wardrobe, production. On a two person short, one of you is the entire camera department and also the entire sound department and also craft services. The departments did not disappear. They are being worn.
Now think about the day a real crew position appears. Nobody makes a speech about growing the team. What happens is one specific afternoon where the director is watching a performance, and watching the clock, and answering a question about the parking permit, and the performance is the thing that loses. That is the day the 1st AD becomes a real job. Not because the crew got big. Because two things needed a brain at the same moment and only one brain was available.
Event teams grow exactly like that. One function at a time, on a day you can usually see coming.
How it works
Section titled “How it works”Start with the unit of the whole thing. An owned function is a slice of the event that has one name next to it, and that person knows the name is theirs. It is not a title and it is not a committee. Titles inflate, functions do not. “Head of Operations” tells you nothing about who unlocks the venue at seven in the morning. “Venue, check-in and signage: Marco” tells you everything, and it survives contact with show day.
Now the useful surprise. Read the TEDx organizer guide, then the DevOpsDays organizing guide, then a film festival’s team page, and the same list keeps appearing under different names. Different worlds, one shape underneath. That shape is nine functions, and it is what a mid-size community event needs covered. Covered, not staffed. Separate questions.
Someone owns the whole thing. The event director holds the vision, makes the final calls, and is the external face of the event. TEDx calls this person the lead organizer and puts the license in their name. Festivals call them the festival director, and describe the job as making sure everyone has what they need and every part is moving smoothly. Notice what that description is not. It is not the person doing everything. It is the person deciding.
Someone owns the show. The producer holds the run of show, the AV, the stage, and the capture, which for you means the podcast recording and the cameras. TEDx bundles content production, stage management, technology, and video into this one role. Here is the trigger that makes it real. The moment your program has cues, walk-on music, a video roll, a mic swap, someone has to run the show from off stage. Your live podcast forces that split by itself, because the host cannot solve problems while recording.
Someone owns the room. Venue liaison, ingress and egress, the check-in table, signage, food and drink. TEDx calls this the event manager and hands them ticketing and registration too. The trigger here is doors. The first time attendees arrive faster than one table can process them, or booths and a stage go live at the same moment, this stops being a hat and becomes a person with a floor plan.
Someone owns the money, and someone owns the reach. Sponsorship and budget is one function, and TEDx says to give it to whoever has real fundraising experience because it is one of the most important components of the whole thing. Marketing and comms is another, owning registration pushes, social, email, and design. Content and media is the third, owning photos, video, and the recap assets that turn this event into the next one. Sponsorship’s trigger is the simplest of all. The first event where you promised a sponsor something specific is the event where somebody must own delivering it.
Someone owns the people. The volunteer coordinator recruits, builds shifts, briefs everyone before doors, and dispatches on the day. Convention organizers describe the move from an informal volunteer group to departments with trained leads as the structural change that scaling forces on you. Your trigger arrives earlier than the big conventions would suggest. It is the first event with stations running at once, check-in and stage and booths, because from that moment volunteers cannot self-organize by looking around the room.
And someone owns each guest. The speaker liaison is a single named point of contact so a guest always knows who to talk to. DevOpsDays tells organizers to designate a person or a pair for all speaker communication, so nothing about a guest’s details falls between two people who each assumed the other had it. For you this is the podcast guests and the industry figures you invite, and it is the difference between a guest who feels handled and a guest who feels managed by committee.
Which brings us to the trap. TEDx says it plainly. Scale your team appropriately, quality matters more than quantity, and a smaller event does not need a double digit org chart. An empty box is worse than no chart, because it quietly teaches the team that somebody else has it. So hats are not a compromise here, they are the design. You might own the director, producer, and marketing functions yourself for August. That is honest. A function nobody has looked at is not.
One more line separates a team from a group of helpers. Bus factor is the number of people who would have to disappear before the event stalls. DevOpsDays will not greenlight an event without at least three organizers from three different organizations, and while their stated reason is a broader base of community support, the effect is the same. No single person can take the event down. Ask it function by function. If the owner vanished for a week, could anyone else run it badly? Badly is the bar, and badly is enormously better than not at all.
Filmmakers Connect is already halfway there, which is easy to miss. The volunteer team is organized into departments, and those departments build their own culture and profile their own seniors. That is the Band 2 shape arriving on its own, ahead of the paperwork. Your job is not to invent an org chart. It is to write down which of the nine functions each department already covers, and put a real name on the ones nobody has claimed.
The receipts (evidence, if you want it)
- The TEDx executive team, as published: licensee/lead organizer, curator, executive producer (“content production, stage management, technology, and video”), event manager (venue, day-of logistics, “ticketing and registration needs”), sponsorships and budgets manager, designer, communications and marketing director, website manager, video and production lead, plus backup volunteers (ted.com, Build your team).
- The over-hiring warning, same page: “Scale your team appropriately; quality is more important than quantity… if you’re having a smaller event, you may not need a team of 10 or more.”
- DevOpsDays requires at least three organizers from three different organizations before an event is listed, so there is “a broader base of support and involvement from the community,” and delegates by function rather than title: talk proposals, speaker communications, website, sponsorship, registration and invoicing, venue and local logistics, merchandise, evening event (devopsdays.org/organizing).
- Meetup’s leadership model for the 30 to 150 band runs organizer, co-organizers, assistant organizers, event organizers, plus per-event hosts, and their own guidance puts the ideal at two to three co-organizers so no single person is a bottleneck (help.meetup.com; meetup.com blog).
- The festival director’s job described as ensuring “that everyone has what they need, that all of the parts are moving smoothly,” and the note that many festival directors started as volunteers or ops staff (Berklee careers). Festival teams form functional groups (Operations, Programming, Marketing) each with a lead (Ticket Fairy).
- The production split at scale: “The producer makes the plan, the stage manager gets the presenters ready, and the show caller says when everything happens” (MeyerPro). You meet this properly in Lesson 3.1.
- Volunteer-run conventions organize into departments (Con Ops, Programming, Guest Relations, Registration, Volunteer Coordination and more), and the scaling insight is the move “from an informal volunteer group to a hierarchy of departments with trained team leads” (Ticket Fairy, scaling fan conventions; live examples at Anime Central and Sarasota Film Festival).
- No credible published volunteer-to-attendee ratio exists, so this course never quotes one. Staffing gets planned by stations multiplied by shifts, which is Lesson 2.7.
Your one move
Section titled “Your one move”Put this table on a page or in a tab of your master sheet, and fill the name column for the August event. One name per function, real names only, and the same name may appear as often as it honestly needs to. Then circle every function where the name is yours.
| # | Owned function | Owns |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Event director | Vision, final calls, external face |
| 2 | Producer | Run of show, AV, stage, podcast and video capture |
| 3 | Venue and registration lead | Venue liaison, ingress and egress, check-in, signage, food and drink |
| 4 | Sponsorship and budget lead | Prospectus, sponsor relationships, the money |
| 5 | Marketing and comms lead | Registration pushes, social, email, design |
| 6 | Volunteer coordinator | Recruitment, shifts, briefing, day-of dispatch |
| 7 | Content and media | Photos, video, recap assets |
| 8 | MC and host | The program’s voice on stage |
| 9 | Speaker and guest liaison | One point of contact per guest |
Twenty minutes. Done when every row has a name and the circles are drawn.
Want to go further?
Go back through the rows and write a second name beside each one, the person who could run it badly if the first person vanished for a week. Every row where you cannot write a second name is a bus factor of one, and those rows are your recruiting list for the next two weeks.
The needle: an event is won before doors open, and the circles you just drew are the exact moments on show day when you will be needed in two places at once. Move a circle now and you have changed what show day feels like, months before it happens.
Terms introduced
Section titled “Terms introduced”Check yourself
The August event has a live podcast recording in the middle of the program, with walk-on music, a video roll, and a mic swap. You are the one hosting it. Who runs the show?
One volunteer built the Luma page, owns the sponsor email thread, and has the only copy of the deck. Two weeks out she gets sick and goes offline. What actually went wrong here?
An organizer drafts a fourteen box org chart for a hundred person event, then fills two of the boxes because that is how many people are actually committed. What should they do?
You can move on when you can… name the nine functions from memory, say the trigger event that makes the producer, the volunteer coordinator, and the sponsorship lead necessary, and point at your own chart and say which functions still have only your name on them.
Go deeper
Section titled “Go deeper”- Next up: 1.3 · The runway, where those functions get a calendar and you find out which work has to start first.
- Optional listen: Why All Event Organizers Need An Entrepreneurial Spirit, with Deanna Nwosu (Endless Events, about 30 minutes). It never draws an org chart, so treat it as career texture rather than instruction. Worth it for her reframe of entrepreneurial spirit as thriving inside whatever role you hold, around 6:33, and for the moment near 13:23 where she argues community management is a function event organizations increasingly need to own outright rather than borrow.