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Crew Manager Boat Websites

Boat Website subscriptions with
Crew Scheduling & Notifications

Created by former J/30 Rhapsody owner

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Set Your Races & Schedule Your Crew #18137
02/11/19 01:18 PM
02/11/19 01:18 PM
Joined: May 2007
Posts: 2,668
Portsmouth, RI
Rhapsody #348 Offline OP
Past J/30 Class President
Rhapsody #348  Offline OP
Past J/30 Class President
Joined: May 2007
Posts: 2,668
Portsmouth, RI
Ahoy Skippers!

The former J/30 Rhapsody owner created Crew Manager for his own boat & crew scheduling and is now making this available to others.

Bottom line: Subscribing to a Crew Manager site really simplifies coordinating your schedule and crew.

[Linked Image]
Boat Website subscriptions with Crew Scheduling & Notifications



J/30 Owners who subscribe will automatically have the J/30 North American Championship scheduled on their calendar.

If you are like me, getting everything coordinated for the season with the boat schedule and lining up crew is a continual challenge. In the early days when I owned Rhapsody I started with a spreadsheet where I typed in the schedule then asked crew to indicate what races they were available. I sent emails every week to remind the crew who was racing and asked who could bring the beer. As time progressed, the tools used to do similar coordination advanced helping with automatic email notifications. Many of the good free websites that handled this disappeared, so I subscribed to Teamsnap. While it had most of the features needed, it was geared towards team sports such as softball and football and was not tailored to boat scheduling. I was paying about $90 per year for a service that did not meet my needs. I provided suggestions on what they could do to help make the product better for sailors, but there was no interest for them to upgrade for the smaller sailing market.

At the end of 2017 I pulled the plug on Teamsnap and decided to write my own program. Since Dave Erwin was kind enough early on to show me the workings of WordPress which is the basis for the J/30 Class website, I had some knowledge on how to create a website and setup things the way I wanted. I wrote additional custom software as a plugin to WordPress to provide additional features that sailors want. Crew Manager was created in time to support the 2018 season. I asked four friends who had boats if they would try it for a season, provide feedback, identify any bugs, and suggest improvements.

Crew Manager has features crew members will use throughout the sailing season. In a nutshell, a Crew Manager website provides a "Who, What, When, Where and Wear" schedule with automatic reminders. After an event, the results may be posted and crew members may submit comments, pictures and stories about the event.
  • Provides a calendar of events for the boat and crew. Additional pages contain links of interest, weather and winds
  • Events include boat location and time to be there and may specify "Uniform" (e.g. orange shirts). It also may include the regatta registration and fee payment status for an event.
  • Crew members set their availability to participate - this is displayed on the events.
  • Updating your availability anytime on the website sends an immediate email to the Skipper (no more surprises!)
  • The Skipper designates boat positions for available crew members and makes assignments by crew member (e.g. bring beer) - all these are displayed on the event
  • Additional information may be included such as weather forecast, tides & currents, links to race documents, etc.
  • Crew members receive a reminder email 36 hours (or time as as set by the Skipper) prior to events for which they are scheduled - all the event information is included
  • Crew members may view a roster with contact information for all crew members. This is only visible to crew members logged in.
  • The Skipper can enter results and a result link on an event - This is automatically emailed to the crew members scheduled on that event

Want to learn more? Full documentation is available on the Crew Manager Support Forum.

Check out these Crew Manager websites:


Re: Set Your Races & Schedule Your Crew [Re: Rhapsody #348] #18138
02/12/19 06:08 PM
02/12/19 06:08 PM
Joined: Jun 2016
Posts: 77
MD
U
usa1136 Offline
Senior Member
usa1136  Offline
Senior Member
U
Joined: Jun 2016
Posts: 77
MD
Interesting. I just renewed my teamsnap account last week. What specifically does this offer that teamsnap doesn‮t?

Re: Set Your Races & Schedule Your Crew [Re: Rhapsody #348] #18139
02/12/19 07:53 PM
02/12/19 07:53 PM
Joined: May 2007
Posts: 2,668
Portsmouth, RI
Rhapsody #348 Offline OP
Past J/30 Class President
Rhapsody #348  Offline OP
Past J/30 Class President
Joined: May 2007
Posts: 2,668
Portsmouth, RI
Just arrived on the left coast to visit my daughter's family so sorry about the delay responding. I haven't used Teamsnap since 2017 so my responses are based on what I left then.

1. Teamsnap no longer offers a public website for your boat. People must be logged in to see anything about your site so the schedule, results, etc. are all private. This was driven by a lack of security in their site that allowed script kiddies to insert spam and take over people's sites. Rather than fix their security, they took down the public sites that "teams" had.

2. Crew Manager provides a public site for each boat. The default site setup includes a Weather page (Windy TM) and Wind widget (Windalert/Sailflow) It also provides a page with helpful sailing links. For Skippers with WordPress experience, the site may be further customized. Teamsnap has nothing like this other than a generic weather forecast - not like Windy.

3. Crew Manager allows entry of weights for each crew member and the skipper may produce a report for the crew on any sailing event. You can enter class limits and have a check against limits. For classes like the J/109 that do not include the helmsman weight in the total, a checkbox may be checked to exclude the helmsman's weight in the check. Teamsnap has weight inputs but does nothing other than report individual crew weights.

4. Crew Manager automatically notifies the Skipper when a crew member changes their availability for an event (options are yes, no and maybe). This was a complaint I made to Teamsnap because I was "surprised" if someone changed their status and did not tell me.

5. Crew Manager provides the ability to run a report matrix of people by crew position. The matrix is filled in with the number of times the person filled that position and totals the number of times crewed at the bottom. This is helpful if you have rotating crew and want to balance the assignments.

6. Teamsnap did not easily integrate with outside calendars. Crew Manager has a calendar you can easily add to most any standard electronic calendar - I link to my Google calendar and don't need to retype stuff on my personal calendar. Others have linked to the iPhone calendar.

7. For classes that require World Sailing Sailor Classifications, Crew Manager allows saving the Sailor ID in a person's profile along with a self declared category (Cat 1 Amateur, Cat 3 Professional). The skipper may run a report and choose to have the Sailor IDs checked in the World Sailing database to validate the category and the date the sailor classification expires.

Crew manager is open to incorporating suggestions that benefit the sailors and skipper. The report of people by position was something I did at the suggestion of one of the Crew Manager skippers. He used to transfer data and analyze it in Excel, but now can just push a button to see it online.

With Crew Manager you are supporting a sailor.... not some big company!

Last edited by Rhapsody #348; 02/12/19 08:11 PM. Reason: added #7 for classifications
Re: Set Your Races & Schedule Your Crew [Re: Rhapsody #348] #18143
02/17/19 11:25 PM
02/17/19 11:25 PM
Joined: May 2007
Posts: 2,668
Portsmouth, RI
Rhapsody #348 Offline OP
Past J/30 Class President
Rhapsody #348  Offline OP
Past J/30 Class President
Joined: May 2007
Posts: 2,668
Portsmouth, RI
J/30 Skippers,

If anyone would like to try Crew Manager with no obligation for a two week trial, please email or PM me with the following information.

1. Boat Name and Boat Type (e.g. J/30 FastBoat)

2. Desired subdomain name - e.g. your boat name is fastboat - you could have fastboat.crew-manager.com or fb.crew-manager.com or something similar. The subdomain must be lower case characters and numbers only.

3. The Skipper's email address

4. The Skipper's First & Last name.

5. Skipper public name to be displayed (e.g. JohnD)

6. Boat homeport (used to customize the wind widget to your local area)

At the end of the two weeks, if you like it, you may order the paid subscription online. If no subscription is ordered, the site will be removed with no obligations.

Free Trial Offer: Set Your Races & Schedule Your Crew [Re: Rhapsody #348] #18160
02/25/19 03:09 PM
02/25/19 03:09 PM
Joined: May 2007
Posts: 2,668
Portsmouth, RI
Rhapsody #348 Offline OP
Past J/30 Class President
Rhapsody #348  Offline OP
Past J/30 Class President
Joined: May 2007
Posts: 2,668
Portsmouth, RI
J/30 Owners,

Free 30 day Trial Offer with no Obligation
[Linked Image]

I am offering a free 30 day trial with no obligation to J/30 owners so you may try Crew Manager with your own custom boat website - no credit card required. This will allow you to enter your boat schedule and crew list to evaluate it and see how it works. If you already use TeamSnap, I was able to help another user get their schedule and crew exported from TeamSnap into Crew Manager.

J/30 Owners who would like to take advantage of the free trial may click this link to have their custom boat website setup.

Your site will be setup within 48 hours. At the end of 30 days, you may renew with a paid subscription. Sites not renewed will be removed after 30 days. Sites renewed with a paid subscription will live forever, unless the Skipper asks that a site be taken down.

As one of my subscribers stated TeamSnap is for soccer moms, Crew Manager is for sailors!


Moderated by  David Erwin, Rhapsody #348 

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