Volunteers are an essential part of every music festival and have been for decades. Festival organisers invest considerable resources on recruiting, training and maintaining their volunteers every year. For this reason, it is imperative that organisers do their best to motivate volunteers ensuring that they return in following years.

Building and maintaining volunteer loyalty requires organisers to focus on numerous factors from recruitment and training to the experience and treatment they receive. Having a core number of volunteers willing to return in future years can save the organising entity time money and effort having to repeat the process every year. There will always be a need to recruit fresh volunteers but if this can be scaled back it makes the process more manageable. What are the key factors that contribute to keeping festival volunteers loyal? 

Volunteer Recruitment. 
Most festivals advertise for volunteers months in advance of the live event dates usually as an application form on their website. Volunteer managers will sift through applicants and offer places to those seen as acceptable. These can take the form of a formal agreement where volunteers agree to perform certain duties in return for festival access for example. Retaining a list of previous volunteers can make the recruitment process much faster and easier as organisers can simply email an offer to loyal volunteers with an offer for their next event. 

Training and Onboarding. 
The volunteer agreement in any offer will require volunteers to undergo training and onboarding and is a key part of building loyalty with new recruits. Organisers will have a list of duties and experience requirements to fulfil (like first aid). Volunteer availability and experience needs to be matched to duties to ensure there is sufficient coverage during the event. Pre-allocating duties to previous volunteers can make the scheduling straightforward and save on training time. 

Building Loyalty. 
Volunteers will feel more comfortable in a supportive and inclusive environment, and it is the role of volunteer manager to manage this with their teams, from the recruitment and training process through to their experience during the event. Provision of all the necessary resources and tools to make their duties easier is a key part of improving the volunteer experience. Running team building exercises can also help the volunteers to bond into a community that feels supported by the organisers and their peers. 

Motivation. 
The volunteer role can be stressful at times given the dynamic nature of a festival where priorities constantly change, and volunteers may be asked to go above and beyond their agreement. Such instances need to be publicly recognised by the organisers both during the event and in social media to all festival followers. Providing additional perks and rewards to volunteers will form part of the appreciation process which can boost motivation amongst volunteers. Recognition of outstanding contributions can also be rewarded by giving volunteers additional responsibilities or being promoted to team leaders. After the festival it is essential that organisers remain in regular contact with their volunteer community with updates about future events and other relevant news to keep them constantly engaged. This sense of belonging can make it easier to bring them into the volunteer programme for next year’s festival. 

For festival organisers planning their events using a software management platform like Festival Pro gives them all the functionality they need manage every aspect of their event logistics including a dedicated volunteer module. The guys who are responsible for this software have been in the front line of event management for many years and the features are built from that experience and are performance artists themselves. The Festival Pro platform is easy to use and has comprehensive features with specific modules for managing artists, contractors, venues/stages, vendors, volunteers, sponsors, guestlists, ticketing, cashless payments and contactless ordering.