Most event marketers using Claude treat it like a freelancer they need to brief from scratch every time. They open a new chat to paste in their venue's voice rules, an example of last week's recap, the show details, and a request for a draft, only to close the tab and start the same loop again the next morning.
Cowork is the version of Claude that already knows all of that, and the freelancer becomes an assistant who's been on staff for two years.
You can run Claude in a browser at claude.ai, on iOS, on Android, or on the desktop, and any of those will do for quick questions. To get the most out of this guide, though, you'll want the desktop app for Mac or Windows, because Cowork only runs there. Cowork is the mode that reads your files, plugs into your tools, and runs on a schedule while you sleep.
Five things to get right before you start writing prompts.
Cowork needs a paid Claude account, and there are two plans worth considering. Pro, at $20 a month, is fine for most people. Max, at $100, makes sense if you're using Claude every day and burning through tokens fast enough that the Pro limits start to feel like a daily annoyance. Start on Pro and upgrade if and when you hit the wall.
Go to claude.com/download and install the desktop client. Cowork only runs there, because it needs the kind of file access that browser apps can't safely give it.
Make one folder on your computer, name it Claude (or whatever you want), and drop in anything you'd want Claude to be able to read: your venue's voice doc, past announcements that worked, your tour CSVs, last quarter's sale reports, signed contracts, press lists, etc. That folder is the boundary, meaning Claude can only read what's inside it, and you're the one who decides what goes in there.
The fear most people have when they hear an AI is going to "touch their files" gets answered by that one rule: nothing goes into the folder unless you put it there, and nothing outside the folder is visible at all.
The fastest way to onboard Claude to who you are, weirdly, is to ask another AI to do it for you. Open whatever assistant you've been using up to now (ChatGPT, Gemini, regular Claude Chat) and paste this prompt:
Summarize everything you know about me, my role, how I write, what I work on, my preferences, as a short profile to onboard a new AI assistant.
Take whatever it gives back, paste it into Cowork, and tell Cowork to memorize the context. Cowork saves it to the right memory files in the background, without you needing to think about where any of those files actually live.
While you're at it, paste in a short brief on the show side as well: your venue or festival's voice rules, your top three past announcements that worked, a one-page sketch of who your audience actually is. The more Claude knows about how you operate, the less you'll have to re-explain on every draft.
A Project is a workspace inside Claude that holds three things: custom instructions Claude follows every time you start a chat there (your house voice, your audience, your rules), knowledge files Claude can reference (past announcements, contracts, briefs, anything you'd want it to draw from), and a memory of every conversation you've had inside it. Think of a Project as Claude's brain for one specific kind of work.
Open Projects in the sidebar and create one for every recurring focus area on the show side of your job: Show Announcements, Press Outreach, Recap Blogs, Sponsor Pipeline, Festival Comms, etc. Pin them to the sidebar so they're one click away.
The operating principle is simple: always open a project before you start working. Every task you run inside a project shares its memory, and the context compounds with each pass. Work outside of the project, and you're back to briefing a freelancer who is starting from scratch.
For ad-hoc questions that don't really fit a project, the kind where you're basically using Claude like Google, the regular Chat tab is fine. The real work, the work that compounds, goes inside Cowork projects.
The setup above gets you running, but the real time savings come from the three pieces below, all of which are tempting to over-reach for on day one. The better move is to wait until the friction in your week tells you which one to learn first.
Connectors are the apps Cowork can plug into so that it can act on your behalf rather than describe what to do. The first time Cowork needs Gmail, for example, it'll ask for permission, and once you grant it, Cowork can search your inbox, read threads, and draft replies, though it'll still pause to ask before sending mail, modifying data, or touching a record.
The connectors that earn their keep fastest for event marketers:
Once a connector is wired up, the prompts you write tend to get a lot shorter. A request like "summarize the agent threads from the last two weeks where the deposit isn't in yet" stops being a half-hour manual dive through your inbox and becomes a single sentence.
A scheduled task is any prompt you've written that you want Cowork to run automatically on a cadence you set, whether that's daily, weekly, monthly, or before every show. You write a prompt that works on demand, ask Cowork to put it on a schedule, and from then on it runs without you. The day-of comms packet gets generated on the morning of every show and the weekly ticket sale snapshot lands in your inbox before coffee.
For most event marketers, the scheduled tasks that earn their keep first are a Monday ticket-sales digest, a weekly stale-thread sweep ("agents you haven't replied to in 7 days"), and a morning-of show-day comms generator.
A Skill is a Markdown file that Cowork loads automatically when the work in front of it matches the file's description. Each Skill lives in a single file called SKILL.md with two parts: a description at the top that tells Cowork when to use it ("Use this when drafting pre-show announcement emails for any [Venue Name] show"), and the rules underneath, which cover voice guidelines, required elements, length caps, and a few examples of past output that worked.
When you ask Cowork to write a pre-show email, it scans the available Skills, finds the one whose description matches your request, loads that file, and follows the rules inside it. The Skill activates because the situation called for it, with no menu or command on your end.
Cowork keeps Skills in a dedicated skills folder. You can write your own SKILL.md and drop it in, or install plugins that come with Skills already built. (If you can't remember where the folder lives, ask Cowork to show you.)
Here's a complete Skill you can drop into your skills folder today. Save it as pre-show-announcement-email/SKILL.md, then ask Cowork to draft a pre-show email for any upcoming show, and the Skill will load automatically.
--- name: pre-show-announcement-email description: Use this skill when drafting a pre-show announcement email to ticketed members or the venue's email list, for any show with a confirmed date, doors, and presale code. Trigger on requests like "draft a pre-show email for [artist]" or "write the announcement for [show]." --- # Pre-show announcement email ## What this email is for A pre-show announcement is the first email that goes to the venue's list when a show is announced or hits on-sale. ## Voice rules - Insider tone, never hype-y. Avoid generic adjectives like "amazing," "incredible," "unmissable." - Write like you're telling a regular what's worth coming out for. - Short sentences, most under 20 words. - No exclamation points outside of subject lines. - Don't compare the artist to other artists unless the comparison is specific. ## Required elements - Artist name and any opener (if confirmed) - Date and day of week - Venue name - Doors time and set time (if known) - Ticket link - Presale code, with start and end times (if applicable) - One or two sentences on why this show is worth the night out, specific to the artist or the moment ## Length Body under 150 words. Subject line under 50 characters. ## Structure 1. Subject line (under 50 chars, no all-caps, no emoji) 2. Preview text (under 90 chars) 3. Opening sentence that names the artist and the date in one breath 4. The reason this show matters (one or two sentences) 5. Logistics block (doors, set time, ticket link, presale code if any) 6. Sign-off in the venue's voice ## Examples that worked [Paste your top three past announcements here so the model can match the voice.] ## What to avoid - "We are thrilled to announce" and any variant - Press-release language - Stacked superlatives - Telling fans how they should feel about the show
Replace the bracketed examples section with three of your strongest past announcements before you save the file, because the Skill is only as good as the examples you give it.
For event marketers, the Skills worth building next are the ones for the rest of the weekly grind: a recap blog opener, a press FAQ generator, or a sponsor follow-up template. Each one captures the small set of decisions you've made over years of doing the work, and each saves you from re-explaining those decisions every Monday.
Skills are powerful, and they're easy to over-engineer, which is the trap most people fall into. Build one, use it for two weeks, refine it, and only then start on the second.
Pick the right model. On the $20 Pro plan, run Sonnet, which is strong and won't burn through your limits. On Max, switch to Opus, which thinks a beat longer and produces output that lands a little sharper.
Ask Claude to set things up for you. This is the move most people miss. If you want to connect HubSpot, or Slack, or your inbox, just say something like "I want to start using HubSpot with you, walk me through it," and Claude will give you the exact steps. The same goes for any tool, any workflow, any unfamiliar concept. In other words, Cowork can teach you Cowork.
Once your context is loaded, your Projects are pinned, and your connectors are wired up, the work itself starts to change shape. Drafting a tour announcement comes down to a sentence ("draft the announcement for Pittsburgh on Oct 14, here's the routing CSV"), because the voice rules, the past announcements that worked, and the venue tone are all already loaded into the room before you start.
You ask, Claude delivers, and the rest of your morning is yours.
Trade workflow notes with peers running shows: https://backstage.hive.co/community