How to Drum Up Good Volunteers for Your Event

TIPS & TRICKS

Need more helping hands than you ve got? Don t have the budget to have your paid staff picking up litter? No matter what your event topic is, there s someone out there who desperately wants to go but can t afford the ticket. Even better, there s someone out there who loves your theme so much, they d be thrilled to have back-stage, hands-on access in exchange for a couple of perks. Here s how to catch and keep these lovely unicorn-people.

The Big Leagues: Call in the Heavy Hitters at the Work-Exchange Team

Running a massive festival or concert? The Work-Exchange Team by Shimon Presents is one of the industry leaders for large-scale event volunteer recruitment (there s also a pool of volunteers with Oxfam America, but they are typically only available to concerts featuring Oxfam-supporting artists). The major draw is WET s vetted database of potential volunteers, many of whom have worked festivals before in exchange for free tickets.

How to Recruit Festival Volunteers for Your Event

Some crucial deets: Our website has been specially developed for the management of volunteers for events. It is secure, easy-to-use and has over 50,000 registered users. Our online application will go live, and our marketing team will begin sending out branded HTMLs to our lists of over 90,000 past WETs to help you recruit your volunteers. It is very important that your event also provide marketing services to recruit your volunteers, as your volunteers will ultimately come from your group of fans. As applications are submitted, we continue discussions with your event and begin deciding on volunteer hours and placement. The event deposit will then go live, at which point volunteers will lock themselves in with a ticket-price deposit that secures their spot on the team and their services for your event.

DIY Recruitment

Plenty of festivals do their own recruitment, and interested people will check your site for volunteer opportunities. Knowing that, this one s a no-brainer: your call for volunteers should start going out on social media, on your website, and via your newsletters and collateral shortly after the event dates are announced. Putting your volunteer opportunities on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks allow people help to catch that I can t, but my friend might be interested crowd.

Got a Good Cause? Use Allforgood.org

Allforgood is a great platform to hook willing volunteers up with volunteer opportunities. Unlike other volunteering sites which focus more on long-term, repeat organizational volunteering, the Allforgood platform is more conducive to posting short-term opportunities.

No cause? Then perks are everything.

If you aren t giving volunteers the chance to serve the community, what are you offering? Free tickets, naturally, but what else? T-shirts? Goodie-bags? Backstage access? Meal tickets? Unless your event is highly exclusive, very expensive or super-famous, you ll need to entice the best help with the best incentives.

Make work hour expectations clear

To avoid misunderstandings (hah!), it s crucial that you let potential volunteers know exactly what you ll be asking of them. Here s a good example of volunteer pre-wrangling done right: Bonnaroo Volunteers page does an excellent job of outlining the volunteer experience, including how many hours volunteers will be expected to work, who can volunteer and what to bring. You may also notice that quite a few major festivals require volunteers to pay a significant deposit (up to $400 for some) as part of their application, refundable after the volunteer discharges their duties (all too well can we imagine the situations that lead to the need for that rule).

I ve got volunteers: Now what?

This astute post on the When I Work blog notes, Good volunteers are attracted to good organization and bad organization repels almost everyone who might otherwise give you their time. Show them you re organized by explaining your mission, the work description, and time goals in detail and be sure to communicate effectively. We couldn t agree more: nothing drives away present and future volunteers like trying to help someone who doesn t have it together. So, get organized, and make sure you have a management strategy in place for your volunteer team.

If you ve got a large pool of help to oversee, call us: Decibel s pretty darn good at herding those cats.

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