Volunteer Recruitment at Events

Daniel Thompson has put together a useful document with a number of ideas and links that he uses for recruiting volunteers for major events, maybe useful for your VB event and club activity. Just adjust for your county and local community.


An aspect of my role as the National Volleyball Centre Coordinator involves creating a sustainable workforce for our major events held at the National Volleyball Centre. The aim for these events is to recruit as many local (Northamptonshire based) individuals as possible so that we could:

a) Save on volunteer expense costs
b) Promote volleyball to the wider community – hopefully this will attract more people to watch and play the sport within the local area,
c) It offers a sense of community value within the area – this is good for our partnership with Kettering Borough Council

Please see the following recruitment methods that I use when trying to recruit a local volunteer workforce for Volleyball England’s major events held at the National Volleyball Centre:

• Upload all volunteer roles on the https://Do-it.org volunteering webpage

• Upload all volunteer roles on the www.Joininuk.org volunteering webpage

• Contact the local CSP asking if they can advertise our volunteer roles on their website.

• Contact Voluntary Impact Northamptonshire asking them to promote our volunteering opportunities on their website, social media and to their database. For the last two major events I have also contacted Voluntary Action Leicestershire asking a similar thing.

• Place an advert in the 4Locals magazine (this is a high quality, independent community magazine that is delivered free to approximately 17,000 homes in Kettering on a monthly basis). This advert gets released about a month or two prior to the event occurring, it promotes the event also.

• Contact previous volunteers about our major events coming up – Volleyball England used to have a volunteering database (set up through Ilona Berry), when I first started I contacted the volunteers who had previously volunteered at a major event within the last two years. Over the last 9 months Fiona Sweetman (Workforce Officer) has created a new volunteering database as we found that the previous database was outdated.

• Advertise volunteering opportunities at the National Volleyball Centre through posters and the on screen plasma in the reception area.

• Send volunteer posters to all local secondary schools within the Northamptonshire area, some teachers I know are proactive and do put on their onscreen school plasma screens and on their sports noticeboard however others probably don’t bother at all.

• Get in touch with local community groups and schools to act as courtside assistants. One role we require an abundance of volunteers for is the courtside assistants’ role. The best strategy to ensure that we have numbers for this role is inviting a local community group or school to assist.

We have developed a great relationship with the two local Air Cadets organisations who are happy to assist as long as they have been given enough notice and they don’t have anything else they are involved with on the day. We have also worked with Ise Valley Scout Group in the past as well.

I’m looking to set up and run a district scout volleyball tournament sometime soon, this should promote volleyball in the area and possibly attract more organisations to come and assist. We don’t tend to get any luck with school groups coming forward for weekend competitions as the school teacher doesn’t have access to the minibus but any midweek competitions such as NEVZA I tend to get at least one school to assist. The best luck we have had is through my own personal contacts in the area and with other volleyball enthusiastic PE teachers we know about.

• For the past two academic years I have set up and run a leadership academy (this was assisted by a district School Sport Manager working for the local CSP), the volleyball leadership academy is open to all Northamptonshire schools as an option for youngsters to enrol on and be apart off during the academic year. I run various activity sessions throughout the year and invite the young leaders to assist at our major events.

When does recruitment start?
For the National Cup & Shield Finals and the Super 8’s Playoff Finals I tend to start recruitment in January so that gives us a good 4/5 months to recruit volunteers.

For the NEVZA Championships again I work on a 4/5 month recruitment window so start recruitment come end of May/June time.

Daniel Thompson
National Volleyball Centre Coordinator
November 2016

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