Tips for Organizing Events

[FigureSpins]

I know there is a lot of work that goes into events, like hospitality, etc. 
Our Club is hosting a skating competition in the near future and I'm going to organize volunteers and contributions. 

I thought a topic for "How to Get It All Together" for events would be useful. 

Any tips for volunteer sign up and what/how to ask?  What types of hospitality items would be best?

[Kim to the Max]

For hospitality, baked goods and crockpot meals work well. If you are doing a judges room, they are in and out, so they need things that will still be there later and something warm after being rinkside are nice. When I was in Milwaukee, we always had parents bring in things. The club also purchased fruit platters, etc. from the local grocery store and got donations for other things. One of the nice touches they always did was to have a water cooler for the skaters right by the ice entrance (the board had a connection with a water company, so they got it free/cheap).

Also for volunteers, we always had the kids act as runners for music and results. It was fun and got the kids involved. But, that all depends on the kids and the rink setup, etc.

[FigureSpins]

We have kids act as runners, too.  We have adults do announcing, registration, results, hospitality, setup, breakdown, etc.

A friend recommended this site for volunteer scheduling/sign up:
http://www.volunteerspot.com/index

Any reviews or alternatives?

[Purple Sparkly]

A friend recommended this site for volunteer scheduling/sign up:
http://www.volunteerspot.com/index

Any reviews or alternatives?

VolunteerSpot is being used to coordinate volunteers for Adult Nationals in Salt Lake City.  It might be worth it to contact them and ask for some information about it.

[techskater]

F you are oirganizing volunteers, good luck!  I have had to do that several times and people don't pick up the phone when they don't recognize the phone number and then don't return it when they hear what you are caling for.  If you are lucky enough to see people, it's typically easier to entice them to "play".  i

[Sk8tmum]

Please be sure to check with judges/officials in terms of dietary restrictions (medical, religious, etc) - as it is appreciated.

[FigureSpins]

We went with www.volunteerspot.com, but it doesn't play well under IE 8.0.  When I chose to Start New Actitivy, I could see the menu to add a new one for a nanosecond, but it was replaced with a black screen.  Their help function doesn't mention this, but I found a support blog post that suggested refreshing the screen (nope, didn't work) or using Firefox.  I love it when vendors' solutions involve using another tool rather than their fixing the problem in their programming. 

It works on my laptop, so I'll probably just use that to do the setup.  Kind of silly since it's a web-based system - the computer and browser should not matter if it was developed properly.  I'm a little worried about the users being able to sign up - what if the browser issues get in their way?  Eeek.

Lots of pretty graphics plus tons of active scripts that validate constantly, slowing down the system.  I typed in too many characters for a task title and the system paused so it could display a message saying the title was more than 40 characters, which is the limit. Gee, how about putting that on the pretty blue screen or waiting until I try to save rather than holding up the entry when I press TAB?

Great idea, poor human interface programming, but it does work pretty well so far.  I have to do a lot of data entry to get the weekend schedule and all its tasks set up. 

One feature that would be nice to have is a block scheduling tool, so you could enter "Runners needed" and give the time frame (8am - 4pm) to be broken up into 1-hour shifts.  Instead, you have to create separate tasks for each time slot, ie. "Runners 8-9am, Runners 9-10am, Runners 10-11am, etc."

[PinkLaces]

We use sign-up genius for our competitions. www.signupgenius.com The volunteer coordinator makes a sign up list for each category - rink monitor, awards, registration, etc.  Then sends out the links to each list via e-mail.  It sends her an e-mail every time someone signs up for something. If people sign in with an e-mail, it will send the each volunteer an e-mail with a list of the things they signed up for.  We do 2 competitions a year and this has really helped us. 

[Purple Sparkly]

I signed up to volunteer at Adult Nationals using VolunteerSpot and I agree that it is slow.  I didn't have any other problems with it, though.  At least, not that I can remember.  I was using Safari on a mac.

[Isk8NYC]

Just bumping this up since I received an email from VolunteerSpot today.  I liked using it for the competition.  The only bottlenecks were in the hard-to-fill slots like the Announcers, which required orientation and shadow-announcing. 

Different issue: our competition had mostly Basic Skills events on Sunday.  It was difficult to find volunteers for those time slots because the Basic Skills parents aren't involved in the Club.  I think it was a combination of "no one asked us to help" and "our events are over; we don't want to come to the rink for strangers' events."  Hindsight being 20/20, I didn't need to have any "shadow" slots on that day since the competition was almost over.  Removing those tasks from the lineup on Sunday would have been good - I could just focus on filling the lead spots instead.

Our Hospitality Chair set up a separate list for her responsibility, which made my task list much less complex.  It was a good choice.  I don't know how well we made out with the transportation issue for judges - the time slots were on my list, but someone else coordinated the actual trips since judges were flying in from out-of-town.

[isakswings]

This is good to know! I may try that website for my next test session. I have a test session this coming Saturday and something like that would have been so helpful! I will be sure to let the person organizing our competition in November know about it as well. Thanks for sharing. I am on pins and needles about my test session! I have had a lot of help from seasoned people, so I hope it goes smoothly. I have run an in-house sesion but this is my first "real" session. EEK. Volunteers really do help to make these events go MUCh smoother. Too bad a lot of parents/members see it as a hassle. They don't realize how much volunteers play a part in their child being successful in skating. Without the volunteers, we would not have competitions, test sessions, clubs or shows, ect, ect. The majority of the programs(at least at the local level... I am not sure about other organizations) are volunteer run. Thank you to all the volunteers who take the time to do what they do!

[ukmum]

well we have decided to go away for three weeks of sun in Europe.  DD has signed up for tennis and golf lessons so that coupled with a bit of spash swimming should keep us going.  Thanks for the reassurance, kids at our rink never seem to take a break and most are going away to stay near other rinks.  As she literally only got the doubles consistent two weeks ago I was worried that she would be disheartened if she lost them.

We'll see in a month I guess!