Building Your Staffing Schedule
As your event approaches, you’ll want to ensure that your staff and volunteers are well prepared to support your event. This means ensuring that they know where to be and when, and have the information they need to do their job to the best of their ability.
Building a clear schedule that offers time for breaks and provides clear coverage overlaps is essential.
Start by outlining the roles and responsibilities that are needed for event coverage - registration, customer service, exhibit booth, and human directional signage are ones we use often.
Then decide how many people are needed to support each role. This will vary based on how many hours staff or volunteers are expected to work each day. You’ll need significantly more volunteers if they are donating 2 hours of their time, as opposed to 8 hours in exchange for free registration.
Be sure to have a clear list of the tasks required of each volunteer role.
For your registration team, provide a written list of the registration “script” that needs to be shared with each guest.
For your human directional signage, access to the event schedule and a map of the facility will be especially useful.
Your customer service desk staff will likely need a quick FAQ guide of how to access and use the mobile app, plus access to the schedule and facility map.
Having these instructions written out clearly ensures that your staff and volunteers won’t need to rely on you day-of for answers.
Once you’ve outlined the required coverage and tasks, you’ll want to fill in the available slots with your staff and volunteers based on their skills. Have someone who’s tech savvy? Registration seems like a great place for them! An effervescent bubbly personality at all hours? A welcoming human directional arrow and greeter is always a beautiful sight first thing in the morning. A veteran volunteer who knows your programs like the back of their hand? They would make an incredible advocate at your exhibit hall booth.
Now that you’ve got the schedule outlined, be sure to check in with your staff - are there any major conflicts? A speaking engagement or meeting you were previously unaware of? Incorporate those changes before circulating the schedule more widely. With sign-off, share the schedule with your volunteers and repeat the process. Be clear in advance on whether or not you’re willing to accept change requests from volunteers. Some organizations are very flexible, while others don’t have the bandwidth to manage changes, especially when volunteers receive a substantial benefit for their time spent in support of the event.
As a final step before your event, take the time to organize a virtual meeting of your volunteers. Review the overall staffing schedule, the roles and expectations of each position, and the resources available to each group. Give a high level overview of the event program, the layout of the venue, and any emergency procedures you want them to follow. By providing the opportunity to review the materials together and to ask questions, you’ll save yourself immense pressure once at the venue.
Whether or not a virtual meeting in advance is possible, schedule time for a volunteer orientation at the beginning of your event day on site to pause and review the volunteer expectations with the group. Incorporating a physical venue tour to orient your staff and volunteers to the space is also a worthwhile investment of time. In this post, you’ll find TBA’s Staff and Volunteer Schedule Template that we’ve used successfully at dozens of events.
Let us know! What other volunteer roles play a part at your event?
