Today at the merchandiser podcast episode number 21, it's strange how few business models require volunteers to function. But that is what off road racing is. A mix of staff and volunteers that has formed a symbolic relationship
to make your race successful. But unlike the parts of the race that you can control, volunteers are often an unknown variable in your planning process. Very similar to how ensure you are about how many racers will actually coming to your next race. Are you prepared to depend on complete strangers to make your race successful? I guess it depends on if those volunteers actually show up. What happens if they don't? Uh-oh.
Thank you for joining me for the Burchases of Earth podcast. I am Kyle Bondo, your professor Raul Rekenier and Rakes Business Coach. I'm here to make the art and science behind building, promoting, and directing offered races. Simple and understand.
Now, that's kinda what we need to do. You make things simple, and you need to you need to understand it. Just because it's easy, doesn't make it understandable. Just because it's understandable, doesn't make it simple. So we're here to sort that all out. And along with me for this ride is my cohost, but everyone loves to hate Mister Murphy. Why do you hate him? Because he's the guy that likes to wreck everything you
So we don't like him so much. But we tolerate him because we need to learn tons from Mister Murphy. He Rex direct things. We learn how he wrecks things, and then we teach you how to avoid the Mister Murphy in your life. And if you're new to the emergency support, your podcast, welcome aboard. I'm looking forward to having you join us on our mission to teach you how to build better races. And if you're ready to take your race promotion skills to the next level, Let's get into today's topic.
What is a volunteer? More importantly, what is a volunteer in the context of helping you run your race on race day. To answer that, consider this this scenario. Your racer is about to race your race. The racer requests some course information. So they go and find the closest person they can see and ask them for that information. And that person is your race help the 1 you don't pay.
So usually, they get free food or free t shirts and any of that extras, but they're kind of here on their their own accord. So you met you met this person, like, 10 minutes ago and gave them the raw raw speech on how your race will go down. You think they listen to every riveting word you had to say. You also think they have your best interest at heart, but it's not that simple. Replace the word volunteer with stranger. A stranger just walked off the street and into your front yard.
No big deal. Right? Now imagine that stranger is now talking to your kids, if you have kids, but imagine you have kids. And now the stranger just came off the street and is talking to them. What is that stranger telling them?
You have no idea. It could be anything. They could be telling them about the cream truck that's coming around the corner they saw, maybe they need to run and find their parents and get some money for the ice cream. That's not such a bad thing. Some strangers, most strangers are good people. They also could be telling them about the puppy they have in their kidnapper van down the streets. Some strangers are not nice people. And they are bad.
That stranger can be telling them anything and you would never know. Now put that stranger into position of the volunteer that you just talked to 10 minutes ago. Now you see them talking to a racer. What are they telling them? Guess what? You still don't know. The obvious problem here, it has everything to do with trust. In a way, a volunteer is a stranger to you and your event until they're not.
The time period of evaluation between a stranger and a trusted volunteer must be more than the 10 minutes you spent with them during the pre dawn rate hours of race day preparation. That is assuming that you did actually spend some time with them. You did spend some time with them. Right? You did talk to the volunteers? Chances are you were too busy to talk to your volunteers?
He left that up to someone else. You delegated that. Does that someone else have you and your race interest in heart? They better. Same goes for the reason you gave those strangers to become volunteers in the first place. You know that reason? They should volunteer. Did they do it for reward? The awards you give your volunteers can produce some motivated individuals.
Some people like a t shirt. Some people just like helping out. Some people are family members of the racers and just want to do something because the race is going on and a lot of times it they're off and you're waiting around for an hour. And then here they come lab 1. Oh, yeah. Go. Go. Go. And then they're on for another hour. And here they come again. Oh, there's lab 2. Yay. And then they're gone for an hour. Then they finish. You know, for the racer,
that is constant constant constant. You're jacking for position. You're moving in in the house. You're navigating the the train. You're making decisions for the volunteer, for the family member anyway. Man that is boredom city. They're waiting around to hopefully see their loved 1 or their friend where the family member comes zipping through that that transition line, the timing tent
for a small glimpse, maybe a photo. And that's it, then they're gone. And then what? They ain't nothing to do. So a lot of times, you're gonna get a lot of volunteers from people just sitting around nothing to do. They want something to do. They wanna be able to see an exclusive part of the race they didn't get to see before. They wanna be part of the experience
that the person they came with there is doing as well. So you're gonna get a lot of those people, and they're gonna be motivated by simply just wanting to help. They're gonna be motivated by the t shirt. They're gonna you're gonna give t shirt to be like, oh my gosh. For a t shirt, man, I will hand out food all day long. I will sit at a table and take paperwork all day long. I will do anything for you. Because you gave me a t shirt. Some people are motivated that way, but you can't know what a volunteer will and will not do the very first time you see them in your race. Volunteers that show up More than once tend to help build that trust. However, you often have large groups of new strangers to evaluate each and every race.
And this evaluation takes time, and therein lies the rub. Putting a new volunteer, you know, stranger in a position to talk to racers can meet with mixed results. 1 bad scenario would be having a racer receive misinformation. You know, wrong start times, wrong start line locations, it would certainly start to make things difficult for you, especially if it led to having a race or not show up the starting the start line of time. In 1 of our races, we had a volunteer give a
pre ride of the course an hour before the race is gonna start. And because it was a downhill event, we didn't think anything of it. And so a lot of the racers followed the volunteer down the course to to experience the the downhill event get some ideas of the corners and the drops, and then come back to the starting line. Only the volunteer didn't know how to get back to the starting line.
Apparently, the trail spit out some place they didn't weren't familiar with, and they took a left instead of a right. And the whole group of racers went the wrong direction. Which resulted in their race official losing their mind when no 1 was at the starting line. Now, this becomes the race promoter's fault. Because where are your racers? You pay you're paying me to officiate this race, and you told me 9 o'clock, it's down 9:0:5. Where are your racers? And then a few racers show up.
And guess what? The official's like, I guess this is it. We're gonna start now. Now if you have a bad relationship or you will have a very good relationship with a race official, this can be a problem really fast. All because of volunteer did something silly. Now, was the volunteer's fault so they couldn't find the story like, no. It just happens to be the way the park was built, the trail was built, and They just made a mistake,
but it's things like that, is maybe someone who understood the course and how to get back should have been the 1 leading that pre ride. Versus the the 1 guy who may thinks he knows kinda where things are going. This is the kind of things you you have to be understanding these decisions have consequences. And if you delegate these or you ignore these decisions, they can come to burn you.
Misinformation, however, is the least of your worries. What if the volunteer woke up on the wrong of the bed and has a nasty disposition. And they keep frowning. They're complaining about the position you gave them, gave them, or they're generally a pain in your backside. And you've all been to a race where you've known this person. This person is not someone you wanna be around. They complain about everything or worse. They say things. They say things that are inappropriate.
They start looking at racers and, you know, and oggling them. They start making comments about people walking by. No matter their age, gender sex, doesn't matter. They're making all sorts of inappropriate comments and thinking it's okay or funny. And this is not just volunteers in a sense. I've heard officials do this too. This official in a sense, a volunteer We are kinda paying them, but here's a little dirty little secret as race promoter. Did you know you can fire an official?
You darn right, you can. If you hear an official make an inappropriate comments or just be on a plain pain, you can tell them your services are a lot required. Goodbye. Yeah. Maybe you'll have trouble officiating. Yeah. Maybe the USA cycling or or USA triathlon or, you know, pick your USAA
groups will be like upset that you let an official go, but you could tell them why you let them go? Chances are, they're gonna look the other way. They're gonna go, okay, we get it. And you can do that without doing a formal complaint. You can put a formal complaint in too. But with volunteers, you can't put a formal complaint in. So you and your race could quickly go from bad to worse in the reputation department. So how long should you keep someone around like that?
Do you think they benefit your event, or do you think they suck the fun out of the day? The answer seems easy when you put it this way. But how often would you let a volunteer stay around even when no 1 wants to work with them? Do you really need them that bad? If that same stranger walked into your yard and kicked your dog, would you let them stay? Of course, you wouldn't. But it's a volunteer that is sucking the fun out of everything in everyone's day, the same thing.
Only the your the dog in this case is named reputation. And if you ignore the issue and try to make it work, this will actually make the race worse. It will make racers not wanna come back. And the saying goes, you only get 1 chance to make a first impression. Does a bad volunteer ruin that 1 chance? Yes.
Yes. It will. And this goes against if they're your friend, if they're a family member, you're gonna need to make some tough decisions you're not going to be able to play favorites when it comes to your race's reputation. It will make any future chance of a racer coming back to your race much harder 2. I mean, many races
have been sabotaged by nasty attitudes. 1 bad behavior after another, culminating into a native cloud of harmful perceptions rarely an events reputation escapes the stain of a poor volunteer's attitude. So what are you to do? The answer is you need to lead. When you are on the role of the race director, it is your job to lead every aspect of your event. You know when a volunteer is not working out, and you know when it's your job to decide when a volunteer needs to go.
You only need to courage to make the decision before it becomes too late to save your reputation. When your racers start telling you about a person in question, It may already be too late. If you are managing your race correctly, you should already have a feel of when something is wrong, Unfortunately, ignoring those few comments to protect the need from keeping enough manpower on hand is the wrong move. Most racers will not say a thing.
They notice that volunteer behavior. They roll their eyes. They internalize it, and then they just never come back. Oh, but they'll tell their friends. They'll tell her friends about, oh, yeah. That race. Yeah. That had that little guy out of that checkpoint. Oh my gosh. She's looking at everyone's backside. Oh, I'm so creepy. I'm never going back to that race. Or the 1 who was like, yeah, the lady registration, she yelled at me because I didn't sign the bottom of it.
Or I had a guy at registration. I didn't grab the waiver and he says, you have to go get the waiver first. You know? I'm not coming back to that race. Or that official that yelled at staff when it should be yelling at the race director. Yeah. I'm not going back to that race. These are the kind of things. These are the kind of things that ruin your reputation and ruin your race. Any of that won't work either. And you should know this just from just from life that a problem gets worse with time.
And time is that is that thing that just kicks your reputation more and more, the longer you wait, you let this happen. You have to lead. You have to do it quickly before a volunteer can do any more damage. If you let your racers make the decision for you, You are losing that thing that makes you valuable, your reputation. It is your job to provide your racers with the best experience you can deliver. Unfortunately, you will have to let some bad volunteers go.
Even if you need their help, better to be short staffed than to be thought of as a bad race. I know that seems kind of counterintuitive, but if you lead first to protect your racers, and your reputation from those strangers that ruin every everyone's day. Who knows? During the time it takes a stranger to crawl back to the to the kidnapper van they arrived in, You just might find another volunteer, a better volunteer who does put your best interest at heart.
So consider that when you're when you're interviewing and you're talking to volunteers, is if you think of them as strangers first until they prove their trustworthiness, and prove their value, then letting them go will not be difficult. But if you automatically come with them with trust and automatically assume they have your best interest at heart. You're setting yourself up for failure.
So just take that, take note of that, that when you're talking to volunteers and you think of them as strangers, you will have a better time relating to them, giving them positions, and understanding their limitations. So now we kind of understand how to think about volunteers, especially when it comes to our race and our races reputation. Let's talk about managing volunteers.
So every race depends on volunteers. I mean, love them or hate them. The race pretty much depends on them at every level. They are the key element to a race of success. And I've often asked this question, why? Well, it's because no race is an island of and staff is expensive. I mean, you're not talking about large profit margins, so volunteers help Take the burden off the race promoter
to get a race completed. The sheer volume of things that need to get done on race day, very technical and time consuming things, is vast. Course setting alone can take hours for just 1 person to accomplish. And if you don't have someone else setting the course, then you're the 1 setting the course. If you're outside in the course, who's registering racers, who show up early?
Who's watching the gears? Doesn't walk off. Who is convincing the officials that you are in charge and have everything under control? Well, not you. See, you're outside in the course. You're getting ice. You're parking cars. You're putting up signs. So the point is you can't be everywhere at once. There's only 1 u. But a race is more than 1 person. It is a team event that requires you to find help. So who will help you?
Who will be the 1 that the ones that get the things that need to get done on race day done, the answer is volunteers. At least when you're starting off small, and you're starting to show value, volunteers become a huge benefit. If you're just starting out, you don't have the money to hire staff. Nor do you have the business chops to deal with the complications that comes with having employees.
Volunteers, although not staff, will help you fill the gaps on your race day However, before you can leverage volunteers to help you direct a successful race, you need to find them. When you finally do get a group of volunteers to show up, You're not done. Volunteers need to be managed. They need information, assignments, direction,
Remember, all those things you need to take care of race day. Now, add managing your volunteers to that list. And remember, like, we just we just talked about a few minutes ago, You're managing strangers. Some of those volunteers, you never you never know who they are. You don't know what they're capable of. You don't know what they're going to say to other racers. So they're strangers. Hopefully, you have a few in there that you trust.
But think of them as if they're strangers. Well, now you need to add managing them to the list. Volunteers, are only good as the help as as you help them to be. We say that again, volunteers are only as good as you help them to be. You cannot read their minds. They can't read yours, and they will not act until you ask them to. Mostly because they'll be afraid to. They'll be afraid to take on initiative, especially if your reaction to any taking on initiative. Is negative.
And they are raw talent that needs to be refined to useful productivity. How do you do that? You can't just tell them what to do and have them just do it. Or if you could, that would be really easy. Just go do this. Like, oh, yeah. Sure. I know exactly what that is. Yeah. Oh, we're that simple, but it's not. So, of course, Anything I got for you, Rechinir. The Rechinir always has a process to help you get through this. We're gonna go through this process. It's got 4 4, 4 steps, 4 parts.
Let's go with parts. 4 parts. So the part 1 is you have a volunteer captain. Part 2 is that volunteer captain has responsibilities. Part 3, you give that volunteer captain some authority. And then you come to the understanding that volunteers are not staff and how you divide work among
those you trust and those you don't trust. That's really when you come to staff and volunteers. Staff becomes in a setting where you're a small business or a small race promotion, company or event, where you could divide this up instead of staff and volunteers as trusting and not trusting, people you trust and strangers. Let's talk about each 1 of those individually.
So let's talk about number 1, the volunteer captain. And the volunteer captain's role, because there's a fine line between staff and volunteer staff doesn't show up, you can reprimand them or even fire them. If volunteers don't show up, well, they just don't show up. So what do you do about missing volunteers? The short answer is recruit more than you need. Seems pretty logical.
The long answer is find that 1 key volunteer the 1 that you know your goal is going to be there and make that volunteer your volunteer captain.
Now we're talking about the small side of the race. Volunteer captain is a volunteer in itself, which seems kind of counterintuitive. We talk about Stranger's volunteer, but this is a trusted volunteer. This is 1 of your friends. This is someone who who's in, who understands this race, and has your race's best interest in hearts, who understands your reputation.
So when you have a little more a little more growth to your to your race promotion company, this could be a staff member and probably should be a staff member. Someone who just manages the volunteers, and the bigger you get the more important this role is gonna become. So you need a key person in that role. Your volunteer captain has 1 role, and that's the direct volunteers. The volunteer cap captain is different from a volunteer director.
I'm gonna be thinking always a different captain director to kinda the same thing. Well, a volunteer director is a staff per position. Whose roles and responsibilities are dedicated to finding, recruiting, directing, and supporting volunteers during all races in the season. Okay. So think about that. That's pretty big picture. Where the volunteer captain of their hand is the leader of volunteers and helps coordinate and support volunteers during 1 event.
So the director is enterprise executive level, high high thinking, big picture. Do you have 10 events? The volunteer director is someone who helps get volunteers to all 10 events is constantly constantly finding, recruiting, directing, supporting your volunteer efforts. Your volunteer captain is that leader of the volunteers on a race day and they're there to help to coordinate support volunteers during 1 event. See the difference?
The director is directing the operations to get volunteers there, and captain is tactical. It's directing the volunteers on-site as the race is going on. They could be the same person. Just like the race promoter and the race director can be the same person. The volunteer director and the volunteer captain can be the same person. The chances are they're not going to be. This is a staff position that takes some time to fill. The volunteer captain
is not a role you need to wait for. Often, you select the position based on your most dependable volunteer. You can, depending on whatever your race is, pick someone a friend of yours, someone you trust a volunteer or a person you've worked with in the past, make that person the volunteer captain. They're that captain for the rest of the rest of that race, and then it's done.
And then the next race, you can have a different volunteer captain. Where a race director is someone that you eventually want on your staff to help you manage volunteers so that you don't have to deal with managing, recruiting, even evaluating. I mean, this the volunteer directory is someone who's, like, gets rid of the ones that are being bad like we talked about before. They help make them less stranger
ish. So that's how that rules work. So let's talk specifically about the volunteer captain. So number 2, the volunteer captain's responsibilities. So what does a volunteer captain do? So a volunteer captain takes the pressure off the volunteer director or the race director by being in charge of a group of volunteers. This is an important distinction to make because you could have more than 1 volunteer captain
depending on which group of volunteers you have, depending on the size of your race. So to help get specific jobs done during the race, allow the race record opportunity to focus on other things, the volunteer captain kind of assumes that role. So what kind of jobs? You know, a good example of volunteer captain role might be coordinating course marshals.
1 volunteer captain can have half a dozen course marshals porting to them, making them the belly button, and finding out if there's a problem in the course. And that's kind of important. Another example might be a volunteer captain can change an aid station, you know, the manning and supplies of aid stations.
So 1 volunteer captain could have 3 to 48 stations. It could constantly resupply with water and ice, cups, and even new volunteers so that others can take a break around leave. They don't take leave. I mean, depending on a race of size, you could end up using 1 or more captains per race area to handle clusters of course partials and aid stations.
How you break up your air responsibilities is completely up to you. But having a volunteer captain available to you is a huge time saver when it comes to making sure volunteers are engaged having fun and being used to make the race better. This is important, but all their captains are your raw raw. They hear your support. They hear your your biggest cheerleaders.
They're well, makes everyone have them fun. Everyone's had enjoying their their their their time. These are the 8 stations that have, like, costume contests and and and decorations.
These are the people who are constantly excited about being there, smiling all the time. Those are the people you wanna recruit as captains. Not the not the e wars in the home. Well, I guess so. You don't want those. The raw raws make it fun. Because volunteers have fun, just like racers, they have a great experience, they come back. So number 3, the volunteer captains authority.
Your volunteer captain has as much authority as you give them. Remember, these volunteers are not staff, so their authority should not be something that you should really be delegating to an employee. You can make them stand out with either a hat or a t shirt but it would only to to help other volunteers know who to go to when they need to ask a question or need to break. Your volunteer captains are also individuals. And as individuals,
they do very unpredictable things. 1 thing They can happen when you give a volunteer some level of power over others, they can take certain matters into their own hands. This often leads volunteer captains to act in ways you did not authorize them to do. Sometimes, this can be beneficial, like calling the police or fire department when someone gets hurt. Instead of calling you or the volunteer director first.
Other times, this can be harmful by getting the fights of volunteers over who's in charge or telling a volunteer they need to leave. If your volunteer captain is power tripping and making your other volunteer less invested and excited about your event, you may need to demote them or remove them before they do too much damage.
To prevent your volunteer captains from thinking they have more control than they do, you must always state their role upfront to bring them in line when you ex you know, didn't do what you expect them to do. If they don't know what to do, and what you expect from them. How can you expect them to do the job you want them to do correctly? You can't. You have to always be the 1 to make sure your volunteers are doing the right things.
If volunteers cannot successfully get it done, then you need to think about having the critical parts of your event run by staff. Let me say that again. If volunteers cannot successfully get it done, then they
shouldn't be doing that job. And you need to think about having those critical parts of your event run by staff. That may cost you additional money. But if it's that critical to the to your event, then it's probably worth the time and effort to pay, part time, time to pay someone to or even full time. To get that junk dropped them right. Additionally, you need to help your volunteer captain stay organized. You need to put everything you want them to do down on paper.
Your system and processes should be easy to describe to anyone. Do you put in that roles of volunteer captain? You can't expect people to remember everything you tell them. So I have a 1 page like a placemath or a dashboard. As a process description that you need them understand. Something simple. Step 1, step 2, step 3. 1 pager has become excellent training tools
when explaining their job. And it's something that you can they can refer to and they get stuck or forget what comes next. Doesn't have to be complex. Could you give me pictures? Could you give them something to go off of? Don't just give them a couple verbal commands and send them out their way. This can work on very simple jobs.
Like, I want you to start a fan here and make sure no 1 breaks this tape. That's a pretty simple job. But if you have something a little more complex like timing or finish line or registration, you know, 1 pager instructions or 1 pager process diagram that come in very handy. And finally, number 4, volunteers are not staff. It is important that you remember that volunteers are there to socialize and to be active in their community. Not act as your labor force.
And it's kind of an important distinction to remember. Volunteer captains have a similar need. They're not there to enforce your will on volunteers either. Although they are a role that other volunteers report to, They are only there to be the connection or the glue between groups of volunteers and you.
If you prepare them for this role, you will not only help improve the quality of your race, but allow yourself to relax a little bit, knowing that what you need done is actually getting done, but they're not staff. You're not paying them. So you need to have a very careful way of approaching volunteers and not to behave as if you have the ability to order them around. And frankly, you shouldn't be really ordering around staff. Anyway, your relationship should be much better.
But the relationship you have with staff is very different than the relationships you have with volunteers. Volunteers are there because they want to be there. Hopefully, your staff does too, but sometimes you hire staff because you need them. You know? EMT is a perfect example of this. You hire an MDMT,
they're there to do a job. They may not want to be there. They may not have your best interest in heart, but they're there in case someone gets hurt. That they care about. You're raised? Yeah. Not so much. It's a job. They get paid. But someone gets hurt, they're very invested in that. Volunteers are there to have funds, socialize, be part of the community, help out their race, maybe alleviate some of that boredom. They're not there to get a t shirt. They're not there for a free piece of pizza.
They're not your staff. And frankly, you know, if you listen to a a a podcast in the past about using the Disney approach, You shouldn't be treating staff bad at all. You shouldn't be treating volunteers bad at all. You need to approach volunteers with a smile, with an open heart, And with appreciation that they're giving their time and effort for you so that you can make some money, they're not going to to give you a hard time.
If you're gonna make a profit off this race, so they volunteer their time. My real you're you're awarding them. You're not just making just asking of the goodness of hearts. It could be, but and they might voluntarily go to the heart. They just wanted to see it succeed. But just know that going into this is you need to understand that because they're not staff, a volunteer captain is not there to order a bunch of volunteers around.
They're kind of the main cheerleader of volunteers and hope to keep and help keep things organized. You give them the most instruction. And that way, the other volunteers don't have to come to you over and over and over again asking for permission, asking for instruction, and asking for understanding. The volunteer captain becomes that segue. Train up your volunteer captains, your volunteer captains, train your volunteers, and alleviates
you from having to do it yourself and constantly monitoring them. That's the benefit of having volunteer captains. Okay. So we talked a little bit about how to manage volunteers, how to deal with volunteer problems,
and an overview of volunteers. And with getting a little bit into to the other part of management by using Vault of all of your captains to help organize volunteers. But how do you get Vault of yours to your race in the first place? This is an age old question that every race voter asks. Then why do they ask this question all the time? Well, usually because most of them are very lousy at it. Getting volunteers to come to the race is something they use that that kinda happens last minute.
It's the thing they do. They try to get volunteers to show up you know, months before they ask people, they they're constantly putting the feelers out. Hey. If you have family members, But a lot of times, volunteers materialize on race day. It's 1 of those kind of things where you go and gather the like we talked before. Gathering those family members. So and and those that that aren't bad at getting volunteers rarely like to tell others how they get their volunteers to show up on a race day.
Now let's face it. Races are successful when you have a healthy cadre of volunteers to help out. Agreed? Not having enough to cover aid stations, of course, marshals, and parking can take your staff if you have staff away from running the or you, you may have to put on the orange vest and park cars yourself. This is why many race promoters claim to have volunteer recruitment secrets, but don't ever share them. You just go ask just go ask people who run marathons
or 5 k's. You'll hear this on some of the webinars out there about, hey, how do you get volunteers? Well, that's a that's a secret. You know? I have a special little thing I do, and that's how volunteers show up. But you know, they don't like to share what that secret is. I'm here to tell you that those secrets are an illusion. Mean, after you get done hearing this, you'll think that those secrets are not secrets.
And why are they not secrets? Because the key to recruiting volunteers is everything to do with how to motivate a volunteer. How do you get someone to volunteer in the first place? That's what you're you're gonna learn is how to motivate a volunteer to help with your race. And it begins with trying to understand the most that most race promoters struggle with recruiting volunteers.
Because ultimately, it comes down to management. Race promoters simply just don't have enough time and effort to put into recruiting volunteers. And as they as they they put more of their effort into trying to get racers to the race, because racers are what actually makes the race successful.
That's the money that goes in the pocket that helps break, you know, help break even, you know, recoup the cost, put into actually building their race. And anything above and beyond that is the money they're making a profit. And when I say profit, a lot of times that money, not going into someone's pocket. It's gonna it's gonna pay for what little staff they have. It's gonna pay for their time. That they've spent 3, 4, 5, 6 months
of organizing and planning and putting on this race. So this is the thing that no 1 ever sees all that time on an effort and stuff that I put in weekends and Saturdays and those kind of things. And they gotta put back into the race, tables break, chairs break, timing equipment breaks. You'll have to, you know, pay parks and officials on the stuff. So they leave recruiting to the last minute because volunteers are free.
But if you don't have them, it's kinda hard to put on your race. So race firms simply just don't put enough time and effort into recruiting. This leads to that scramble for it to recruit most of their volunteers to help on race day from the attendees that show up. I mean, long after the course need to do Mark and the venue need to be set up, they're out looking for volunteers.
The end result of the race promoter putting on the orange fist and doing traffic control themselves when they should be monitoring their race. I know this is true because I've got a orange vest that I've put on in many different races to cover a place where I should have had a volunteer that people leave for lunch, don't come back. People say they're gonna show up and don't show up. Oh, my friend and my friend's coming and they never show up.
So the official is like, hey, look, you can't start this race unless someone's standing right there. Well, as a race program, you know, nothing you know, what are you doing right now? Well, you guess what? You're putting on orange vest, and you think it was standing. And guard a corner or guard a crosswalk or sit in a piece of trail to alleviate a lot of times an issue that an official has with safety. You know, you can't get around it.
So you kinda fill in that gap when you should be of doing other things. You should be doing a lot of other things. But you can't because you waited until the last minute to move on to recruitment. And I've done this myself. It's hard. Getting people to show up is hard. Getting lots of commitments and thinking you have enough staff. And then on race day, we don't because people this doesn't show up. Tard. That's why staff is an advantage
because they know they're gonna get paid. And a lot of times, They view they view this very differently than a volunteer does because a staff member is getting paid is probably doing that too. Pay rent, car payment, a little extra spending money, maybe to feed their kids. You know, it could be employing a mom or dad. So staff is a little more dependable, which is why staff tends to be something you're kind of striving to to get a cadre of staff members
to work your race, so you don't have to depend so much on volunteers. But you're still gonna need them. You're still gonna need volunteers. To your race, and you should use them. Because a lot of times people don't wanna just stand around. They wanna be they wanna be part of the event. They wanna participate. And being a volunteer helps them become part to share the experience
that that their family member, their loved 1, or their friend, is out doing the race. They get to share that. And that's important. They get to experience it too. So do you still have favor? During your next race and your next playing reading. Sit down and think about the reasons behind why volunteers volunteer. I mean, why do volunteers volunteer? Ironically, it's the same reason that racers race.
Racers race their event to get something out of it, exercise, competition, bragging riots, accomplishments, community metals. The list of why erasers are motivated to a race, you know, can kinda be, you know, endless, but a lot of times it's experiential. The same is true with volunteers. Volunteers are motivated by the same things. And you kind of think about that for a minute. However, regards recruiting them to help them run your race, you need to only tap into really 3 of them.
Because you could you could get motivations to, you know, out all day long, why people do things. Let's stick to 3. I've got a pinpointed 3 of these. Let's talk about these 3 things. These are the secrets that the the people who do marathons, the people who do You know, the xyz races, the big races won't tell you about. This is their their dirty little secret. Comes down to 3 things.
Are you ready? Here's the secret. I know I'm about to blow the lid off of the volunteer recruiting, you know, controversy. The sense of family, the sense of belonging, or a sense of reward. That's it. I know earth shattering. Right? Your brain is blown out of your head. Oh my gosh. It's that family blogging reward. That can't be it.
Each 1 of these 3 reasons is fundamental to getting them to show up to your race. What if you could harness these motivations and get enough volunteers to show up in your on race day? What if you could get so many that you could actually spend more time directing and less time worrying about how many volunteers you need? You can, if you simply appealed each of your volunteer sense of family belonging report.
So let's talk about that. What is included in each 1 of those 3 secrets of volunteer recruiting? Well, number 1 since a family. Most family members come to the race to be spectators. We kinda talked about this with with race captains and other and other aspects of that. However, you can convert these family spectators to volunteer before on race day.
You know, race day foul members or spectators often realize they're probably not gonna see much, and we talked about this. This is the same thing is getting someone to combat the boredom by being part of the race. They'll provide all the racers with the added experience of having the group of happy volunteers cheering them on, they get to be part of that, but they also get to be in the race.
They already get to to participate in a way that their family member didn't get to participate. And another stand on the sidelines and taking pictures in the raw raw. I mean, they get to be a be a be a part of the machine
that helped the experience of the loved ones. So the loved 1 comes in and talks about oh, I made that they move, they passed that other guy, or I climbed that hill really fast where last time I had to walk it. The family member was like, that's awesome. We were handing out water, and this 1 guy grabbed the water and exploded. And another guy wanted gatorade, but I gave him water. And he was like, hey. I really wanna gatorade. So I ran and chased him down and gave him gatorade.
I mean that's the kind of thing. When you can get the whole family involved in a race, that is how you create a repeat customer is when you can employ volunteers to be part of the experience. You now have a formula that won't get racers come back because the family member is gonna be wanting to come back. Hey. Remember that race we did at Rocky Gap State Park. Yeah. The kids gotta play in the lake. Oh, that was awesome. And when I did registration,
and I helped hand out t shirts, and then you raced a race, and then I was out panning out water. Remember, you came by and you had some water? Oh, man. Let's do that again. That was fun. You didn't read that race this year? That's the kind of thing. That's the sense of family. How about sense of belonging? Some people are very new to the sport and wanna see what it's all about.
Mean, others understand the sport, but they've never raced it before. I mean, most of these potential racers wanna know whether that was the right thing to wear You know, what what they wanna buy is gear? And, you know, they they don't wanna look foolish. And this is important. A lot of newbie racers of this desire to be connected to the racing community, and they're they're kind of exploring the newfound interest in that racing community.
But they don't wanna look stupid. They don't wanna look dumb. They wanna show up in their their 19 seventies, chased me shorts. You know, they're they're tennis shorts and look completely out of place. So they wanna pounce on the the potential volunteer opportunity. It's a safe way to connect with racers and observe them. Kinda like seeing them in the wild. It's this way of, like, watching the natural habitat of the racer. I can see, oh, hey. Look. They buy Nike's. I like Nike's,
but those are also kind of different kind of Nike's. Hey, what kind of shoes are those? Wow. Look at that. That's 2 x u. Never seen that before. What is to excuse you? Let me look up that on my phone. Oh, look. It's compression wear. I didn't know that. Look at that guy's got ladies. I really like those. Hey. Look at that shirt. That's under armor. Oh, look at it. I didn't know they made it under armor shirt like that. Hey. He's wearing he's wearing a golf hat. That's weird, or he's wearing a Boston Red Sox hat. That's interesting. Look at the sunglasses. He's got a strap around the back. Wow. Hey. He's got that thing on his back. What was drinking out of it. Wow. I didn't know you could carry water with you.
Look at the the the belt he's got on. What he's got little, like, little jars, this thing? Oh, look at these guy, like, goo or some sort of liquid in there. Hey. What is that? Oh, it's glucose. It's like this one's really it's like a goo. Right? Oh, look, he's eating some sort of strange candy bar. I saw a candy bar. I thought it was like a oats or something. Oh, it's a cliff bar. This is why they come. This is why they come to observe.
You can reach people by creating kind of 1 page brochures and flyers they're easy to place in shop windows, in a coffee shop, cork boards, gym announcement boards, college campus centers, car windows, No 1 likes car window stuff. But, you know, it's some in some places that works. There are recreation entrance centers. You can drop off and leave behind. That's what these are called.
That play positive imagery and positive to elicit that emotion and capture the eye, that people see these good visually, these flyers, spaces, smiles, people smiling on the flyers, provide these, you know, this good response in social media ads. You're getting that word out. You can inspire people to see, I really would like to try that sport, but I'm kinda not sure if I know what I'm doing. You can elicit volunteers that way. You can get them to come out to see a sport
before they wanna actually try it. These are as pre athletes and get them involved. You want those volunteers who are looking to belong to sports. You need to constantly be bringing that need back to the top of their list until you get enough of volunteers to commit. So this is that kind of that that advertising of trying to connect with those people, maybe you're using social media, If you're using advertisements, with induced within magazines, you're using flyers,
see if you can capture some of those people looking to get into that sport. What is that sport? Why is that interesting to me? And tell them that volunteering is a great way to go to the sport without having to actually commit. Don't have to race. Just show up. Hang out. Have a slice of pizza. Direct some racers, get to know them, get to see what they're wearing, get to talk to them. Hey. How do you train for this? Do you have a group? Do you have a team?
That's the kind of way. That's that sense of belonging. So what's the third 1? Sensor reward. You give a volunteer a reason to volunteer their time and effort, and you win them over. Nothing gets an avid racer, a reason to volunteer, like a discount on the next race. A free race or even some kind of swag. I mean, there are dozens of reasons why some people cannot race on race day. Injuries, family commitments, lack of training, broken gear. That is out of money.
Awarded. They've spent all their money on their races. I mean, the only things can hinder them. But for others, their original plan falls through. And the situation changes, and they find a reason to wanna come hang out with their friends at the race, but, you know, they're not really gonna race. So you encourage these volunteers an incentive that will convince them to pitch in and help, especially the the financial challenge ones too, but everyone likes a good deal. Encourage these volunteers
with, like, maybe 20% off the next race. 15. I'm taking 15 bucks. That they can use to to register for your next race. Then give them a free t shirt and free pizza. Give them a free beer glass. These are volunteering. You'd be surprised what little you need to give a fellow racer to volunteer. You be surprised. Some will do it for nothing, just for the love of the sport and hang out with their friends. But nothing gets those that love racing to volunteer more than to pay for their next race.
And communities are real thing, and every race discipline has a a full assortment of fans, groupies, enthusiasts, or zealots who talk and walk and bleed racing. You've met them, you know them, you could probably name a few off top of your head. They will even be more devoted to you and your next race, you show up with a little you show them a little appreciation. You give them something to thank them for their help. Be very upfront about what you plan on giving them to.
And make sure you fall through with it. Don't hide it, and don't save it for for the very end because volunteers come and go. If they show up for an hour, give it to them. If they show up, I mean, hopefully, you you get some you you get some This is how you determine what you talk about for strangers versus trusted volunteers. Is
you're gonna give it to them. They sign up, hand it to them right there. That way you don't have to track them down at the end of the day. They don't forget about it. They have it in their hand. Because that's a customer. That's a potential customer. Yeah. It might be 20% off. Yeah. It might be 15 bucks off, but you gave them something. And now I have a reason to sign up your next race.
So you already have someone coming who's gonna tell friends about what they did and friends of other experience. If you hand someone the $15 off or 20% off coupon that are even getting in the morning and they leave, Well, that tells you everything you need to know about that person. Now, of course, they could have had an emergency. Something could have happened. These volunteer. Right? You know, things happen. But chances are, and there's there's
tons and tons of sounds just some research and those kind of things about it. If you give someone that up right up front, you're probably gonna get them to stick around. In some volunteers, even if you give them that stuff, and they're not gonna race. Some volunteers just don't race. Some volunteers just come out to volunteer. They have to hang out. Their friends are racing or they make friends there. Give them a way to share that coupon with someone else.
Don't say, well, you volunteered. It's only for you. I'm gonna share it. They wanna give it to someone else? Let it give it to someone else. Why? There's another customer. Get another opportunity for them to counter your race, your skills, your experience, you're gonna provide somebody. And they'll come back to your 3rd race and your 4th race. Create a customer for life. Don't be chintzy.
Don't be like, you know, oh, 20% off. Only for you, and it's nonrefundable, and it's only good for this year. No, man. Make that coupon good for life. As long as your company is alive, make that coupon good. 20% off a race, 15 bucks off, 5 bucks off. Doesn't matter. Make it accumulative. Making sure if they volunteered 5 bucks off every race for volunteering. At the end of the year, they can cash it all in. Make it a contest.
If you cash it all in, not only will I give you a free race, I'll give you 2 free races. I'll give you a t shirt, special t shirt, volunteer of the year t shirt. Then you have people who are going, I wanna be volunteer the year. That looks cool. I want a free race. I want 5 bucks off. You know what? I'm gonna volunteer because I paid $25 my last race. I wanna pay $20. Or I'm gonna collect a bunch of them and get it free of race.
Then you have 5 times someone volunteers for the $25 race. You have 5 bucks every time they volunteer. And they're there, they're engaged, you get to know them, that is a sense of reward. And that's the secret. That's how those other those other race promoters, the other race promoters, keep people to come to races. That's it. That's the secret. And now for some final thoughts. Make sure you know how many volunteers you need to make your race happen before you start heavy recruiting.
If your event only needs 9 volunteers and you have 3 family members helping out, 3 friends from your club coming to support, 3 fellow racers wanting to know what you need, then you really don't need to find that many volunteers. But how do you know you need 9 volunteers in the first place? What positions do you have? What positions will you need to back up or have a shift changes? I mean, how long are you gonna be out there? What positions can't be filled by volunteers.
That's a critical 1. Chances are you will have to move trusted staff away from aid stations or course marshal positions at the last minute. Can any of your volunteers fill in for them if that happens? How do you know? Do you have any floaters or people that handle those situations? What about if any of those 9 volunteers Don't show up on race day. Volunteers get sick, family emergencies, and the average no show rate is something like 20%.
This includes volunteers that sleep in or forget they had to volunteer in the first place. We all know those people. Heck, you might even be 1 of those people. If 20% is the 10 people don't show up to your race, now you're down to people. Are you are you padding your volunteer numbers to deal with these likelihoods? Volunteer staffing is difficult, which is why you need to know your real need before you can realistically have any of the the tactics we talked about work.
I mean, once you know what you need, the rest is a matter of putting each of those tactics and strategies to work. So the idea is to understand what exactly is the manpower requirement to run your race. And sometimes this takes experimentation. Sometimes you need to recruit a bunch and see what works. Recruit a bunch and see what works. And you'll start to get an idea of a certain kind of race requires a certain number of volunteers.
And you'll you'll start to get you'll start to get better, better at this. But until you know what you need, you can never know how many volunteers you need. And you're always gonna have a situation where you're gonna not have enough, that's constant. Or the other 1, which is a great problem to have, is too many. Do you have too many in do you double up positions, or can you realistically
put more than 2 or 3 vouchers a certain area. And is there an advantage to that? Or is it a disadvantage to that? So understand what you need. That's kind of how you first approach this. You understand what you need, then you need to understand how to recruit that need, then you need to understand how you manage that need, on race day, and then how to deal with volunteers that are working well and how to deal with volunteers who aren't working so well. And now you know.
In our next episode of the Merchant Center podcast, I'm gonna get into the strategies you can use to improve your race registration numbers. A little practice and some discipline, I can show you how to not suffer the woes of poor registration turnout. All that and more on the next purchaser podcast.
Well, the music means that this is the end of a yet another merchandiser podcast. Episode. Thank you so much for sticking around and listening to the entire episode of of how to manage volunteers and recruit volunteers. Hopefully, you learn something. The key is that I want this to be the standard for how you become a race promoter. And I hope that lessons like this make your off road racing business
the best it could possibly be. But if there's a topic that you're interested in, topic I haven't covered yet, would really like to hear from you. I'm at merch as a dirt on Twitter. Just send me a tweet, and I I will definitely read it, and I definitely read all of them. But if you have 1 of these specifically that you would like to hear me cover to shoot it out. I would love to hear it or go on a Facebook. If you go on to meritor.com, there's a link on there to the VirTra's
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I hope that this helps you get more volunteers and that you're able to recruit a whole ton of people and come out to your next race. And I'll see you on the next episode of the merchandiser podcast. And until then, go build better races. Take care.