I was fortunate enough in my position to help my employer recruit both employees and volunteers for this event. I now have a new found respect for the amount of time and effort spent trying to encourage students like ourselves to get involved in volunteer opportunities to boost the credits on our resume.
During the lead up to the event we distributed flyers to the local Universities and delivered presentations to our very own Curtin and ECU in Joondalup. In my experience of recruiting I found that we had to deliver the right messages to our target audience, which for this particular event was the perks that Tough Mudder were offering ($20 entry to future events, breakfast, lunch and a Tough Mudder T-Shirt).
We wanted to make volunteering for the event as hassle free as possible, so we provided two buses to leave from ECU and Curtin each morning to deliver and return volunteers to the city. We found that by communicating these valuable rewards me managed to get a lot more volunteers on board. The majority of our volunteers came from ECU after two of our Uni-Reps did a presentations there which sums up the value of face-to-face communication when trying to get students enthused!
The event was a great success, many of the volunteers were vibrant, energetic and enthused for a fun weekend in the sun. The Saturday kicked off with a massive 13, 800 participants running the event which made efficient volunteer co-ordination crucial. My supervisor was equipped with two radio's to monitor the requirements of volunteers and they were moved throughout the day as the last competitors moved through the early obstacles.
Overall the event was a huge success, and as part of Event Workforce I managed to get a number of workers involved in our newly launched 'EW Hand Signal' we are hoping will catch on!
Planning and working at events has been a highly enjoyable part of my internship. I've loved working alongside my employer and seeing how he tackles the co-ordination of volunteers and communications on event day. All in all it was a very successful weekend for Event Workforce. I can safely say that on Sunday night I found mud and dust in places I never would have expected and my shoes were in a Mudder mess!
Take care
Amy
5 comments:
I've heard Event Workforce is a lot of fun to do work with, Tough Mudder looked crazy from pictures I've seen. What was it like doing PR from an Events point of view? I feel like I'm much more interested in that than just straight PR :)
This sounds like an amazing experience! In my internship we used a lot of volunteers to help run the event. We didn't use nay face-to-face presentations but in hindsight as you explained I also think it would have increased our number of volunteers which would have made the event a whole lot easier!
Hi Amy,
don't forget to include commas in between your tags (even if you include hashtags) - otherwise Blogger is unfortunately reading your tags as one long one.
I hope you had lots of fun on the weekend!
Hi Amy,
Tough Mudder sounds like it was amazing. I am currently interning at an organisation that specialises in events so it's interesting to read the techniques other organisations use to recruit volunteers. I think the best part of events is seeing the event you worked on become a success. So you should be proud of all your hard work!
Ashleigh
Hi Amy
Looks like you had so much of fun! A couple of my friends got involved in this and they absolutely LOVED it! said it was so much of fun and they cannot wait to do it again!
Should be very proud of yourself and what you and the rest of your team accomplished!
Emily
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