How to staff an event when you cannot afford staff

Stewarding, wristbands, information points, setup and teardown can all be volunteers. Security above your capacity threshold, medical cover and sound cannot, because those carry qualification requirements and your insurance depends on them. Budget for the second group and recruit properly for the first.

The line is competence, not cost

Organizers tend to decide what to pay for by working down from the budget until the money runs out. That produces the wrong answer, because some roles are not optional at any budget.

The real division is whether the role requires a qualification, a licence, or a level of judgement you cannot brief someone into in an hour. Everything on one side of that line can be a willing volunteer. Nothing on the other side can, regardless of how keen they are.

Get this wrong and the consequences are not financial. An event without adequate security or medical cover can be stopped, can invalidate its insurance, and can hurt someone.

What has to be paid

Price the first three lines before anything else in your budget. If the event only works by removing them, the event is too large for the money available, and the answer is a smaller event rather than a thinner one.

Volunteers are not free

Unpaid help costs money and it costs management, and organizers who budget nothing for it get the attendance rate they paid for.

• Food and drink for everyone on shift. Fifteen to twenty-five dollars per person per day, and it is not optional.
• Something worth having. Entry to the event, a shirt, a credit, or a genuine share of what they helped make.
• A coordinator whose only job is volunteers. Not the person also running the event, because that person will be unavailable exactly when the rota breaks.
• Time before the day. Briefing, shift confirmation and chasing is several hours of somebody's week.

Treat volunteers as unmanaged and unpaid and about a third will not appear. On a festival site that is a safety problem rather than an inconvenience, because your steward positions are what your safety plan assumes exist.

A rota people actually turn up for

1. 1

   Written shifts with a start, an end and a named task

   Not general availability. Saturday twelve to three, entrance gate, checking wristbands. Vague commitments produce vague attendance, and people are far more likely to honour something specific.

2. 2

   Confirm two days before, individually

   A single message asking them to reply yes. Anyone who does not reply is treated as unconfirmed and backfilled. This one step recovers most of the no-show rate.

3. 3

   Overstaff the first hour and the last

   Arrival and teardown are the crunch points, and they are the shifts people least want. Put your most reliable people there and accept that you are over-resourced in the middle.

4. 4

   Brief everyone together, once, before doors

   Fifteen minutes covering what to do, who to fetch when something goes wrong, and where the exits are. Most volunteer problems are briefing problems.

Where volunteers come from

Not from a general appeal. A post asking for helpers produces a handful of vague offers and almost no shifts filled, because nobody reading it feels personally asked.

Ask specific people to do specific shifts. Ten direct requests naming a task and a time will beat a hundred impressions of a general call, every time and by a wide margin.

Beyond your own contacts, the reliable sources are student societies wanting experience, community groups connected to your cause, and people who attended a previous edition and enjoyed it. That last group is the best one, and it only exists if you asked for contact details last time.

Keeping them for next year

Recruiting volunteers is the expensive part. Retaining them is nearly free, and almost nobody does it deliberately, which is why most events recruit from scratch every single year.

Thank people specifically rather than generally. A message naming what somebody did is worth considerably more than a group post, and it takes two minutes each.

Ask what was badly organised, and mean it. Volunteers see every operational failure at close range and will tell you honestly if you make it clear you want to know. Then ask whether they would do it again, and keep the list.

How many people you actually need

Organizers usually understaff the boring positions and overstaff the interesting ones. The result is four people around the stage and one person managing an entrance queue of sixty.

Work it out from the physical layout rather than from who volunteered. Every entrance needs two people. Every bar needs someone who is not also serving. Anywhere people can get lost or hurt needs somebody visible.

• Two on each entrance, always. One checks, one manages the queue and the questions.
• One roaming steward per hundred attendees as a rough floor, more if the site has separate areas.
• One person on radios who is not doing anything else, once the site is bigger than a single room.
• Two more than your rota says you need, because someone will not arrive and someone else will have to leave.

Then check the number against your licence conditions, because many specify staffing ratios directly and those are not suggestions. Where your own estimate and the condition disagree, the condition wins and it belongs in the budget rather than in an argument.

What unpaid help cannot cover

A workable structure

Pay for security, medical and sound. Recruit volunteers for everything else, in named shifts, with a coordinator, food, and confirmation two days out.

Then write down who turned up, who was good, and what went wrong. Next year that page turns a recruitment problem into a list of people to message, which is the difference between an event that gets easier and one that starts from nothing every time.