Contents
- The core team plans it, and everybody else delivers it
- Is the student a lecturer sent along really a volunteer?
- In many places volunteering belongs to relief work, not to festivals
- Half an hour, a meal and a payment date
- What does a young person learn about our industry on their first day?
- Why do so few organizers ask for last year’s team?
Think of the last event you worked on. Of all the people on site during the busiest hour, how many were actually employed by the organizer?
If your answer is a small handful, you are describing almost every event I know, and that is what event staffing really comes down to in our business: finding, preparing and managing people who join for a few days and leave when the stage comes down. The core team that lived with the project for months is tiny. Around it stands everyone else: the agency’s project crew contracted for this job, the setup and dismantling crew paid by the day, the hostesses booked through an agency for the day, the security company’s guards, the sound and light technicians from a production firm, the venue’s catering staff and sometimes a handful of students sent along by their department or a lecturer. On a large event there may be a few genuine volunteers among them as well.
None of this is a scandal. Nobody can keep hundreds of people on the payroll for a three-day event, and the work has always been organized this way. What troubles me is how little of the preparation time goes to the people who end up facing the guests.
The core team plans it, and everybody else delivers it
At large international events staffing is a department of its own, built into the event planning from the first month; at most events, almost anywhere, it is a series of phone calls.
The project crew is usually the most professional layer. These people work freelance for different agencies, project by project, and many are very experienced; they know the job, they know each other and they move from a congress in the city to a run of corporate events at a coastal resort depending on who calls first. Daily crews are another world. Setup, carrying, cleaning and dismantling are done by teams gathered through a subcontractor, and the organizer meets them on the morning they arrive. Hostess agencies work in a similar way, since the organization company asks for a number of people at a set hour and that many young people turn up, usually without knowing what the event is, who it is for or when the program starts.
Students are the least regular group. Sometimes a lecturer who knows the organizer directs a few of them, sometimes a student club is asked for help, sometimes a tourism department sends people as part of a practical course, the thinnest link between tourism education and the field. It happens partly and occasionally rather than as a system, and how a student’s day goes depends almost entirely on how the organizer happens to treat them.
The layers do not arrive knowing the same things about the day ahead of them, and the gap is usually wider than the plan assumes:
| Layer | Usually reached through | What they tend to know on arrival |
|---|---|---|
| Project crew | Direct call to freelancers the agency trusts | The job, often the venue, sometimes the client |
| Daily setup and dismantling crew | A subcontractor | An address and a start time |
| Hostesses | A hostess agency | A dress code, a headcount and a place to stand |
| Students | A lecturer, a student club or a practical course | Very little, unless someone tells them |
| Volunteers | A proper program, mostly at large events | Their role, their shifts and whom to ask |
Is the student a lecturer sent along really a volunteer?
The difference between a volunteer and paid temporary staff looks simple. A volunteer gives time by choice and expects something other than money in return: experience, learning, the feeling of belonging to something. The ILO’s definition of volunteer work keeps it to unpaid, non-compulsory activity done for others, and the word non-compulsory is the one I would underline. Temporary staff are paid, and when the project ends, the relationship ends too.
On most events I know, though, what the two share matters more than what separates them. Both have an unclear status, both arrive with little preparation, both are forgotten when the event is over, and both are searched for again from scratch next time.
I’ll be frank: the student is where this gap shows most clearly. Sometimes that student really is a volunteer. Sometimes they came because a friend was coming, or because a request from a lecturer felt hard to turn down. They arrive in the morning, get placed somewhere, stand there until evening and go home without hearing thank you. A real volunteer knows why they are there, while a student who was simply called knows only that they are there.
In many places volunteering belongs to relief work, not to festivals
If you come from a city where event volunteering is ordinary, you may wonder why so many events elsewhere don’t rely on it. Part of the answer is language and habit. In a good many countries, Türkiye among them, the word volunteer is tied to charity, to associations and above all to disaster relief. When an earthquake or a flood strikes, huge numbers of people set out to help, and that is what volunteering means to most of them: serious, heavy, close to sacred. Directing visitors at a music festival does not fit that picture; it reads either as a job or as a favor.
The other part is structure. Where event volunteering has no settled definition in law or in practice, every institution draws its own lines. When there is no category, nobody opens a budget line for these people, and when there is no budget line, nobody is made responsible for them, so the program that might have prepared them never appears.
There are real exceptions. Large international sports games, big city marathons and a few major festivals and technology events run proper volunteer programs with applications, training, shift plans and certificates, and they receive far more applicants than they need. The will clearly exists. What decides the outcome is whether the organizer treats this as a program, and outside the large organizations, mostly nobody asks them to.
Half an hour, a meal and a payment date
The weakest link in temporary staffing is usually the simplest one. Where will I stand, what am I doing, who do I ask, what is this event and who is it for? A hostess who knows the answers greets guests differently from one handed a T-shirt and pointed at a spot, and a student who knows the program can answer what a guest actually asks instead of saying “I don’t know”, which guests remember far longer than anything on stage. It helps to write the role down before anyone arrives, which charities have long done for their volunteers and which NCVO’s guidance on volunteer role descriptions explains well; the same habit works for a mixed event team, as long as the paid and unpaid arrangements stay separate. “Support the event” tells a person nothing, whereas “send registered delegates from the main entrance to the hall and pass badge questions to the registration supervisor” tells them where to stand, what to do and where their authority stops, which matters as much as the task itself, because a host who improvises an accreditation decision creates a bigger problem than one who says “let me take you to the person who decides.” Food, transport and shift length belong to the same half hour. They are lines too small to appear in the event budget review, and when they are missing they decide how that person remembers the whole day.
Hostess agencies will tell you that briefing is part of what they sell, and the better ones do send a team leader who has read the program. Still, an agency can only pass on what it was told, and in our business the request that reaches a hostess agency is often little more than a headcount, a dress code and an address. The details that make a hostess genuinely useful at a registration desk (which delegation is landing late, which room the press conference moved to, which sessions of a hybrid event are being filmed and must not be interrupted, whom to call when a speaker cannot find the backstage room) live with the organizer, so that half hour has to come from our side even when the agency does its own part well.
The people who carry an event on the day are already there; what is missing is an organizer who treats them as part of the plan rather than as a number on a supplier’s invoice.
Payment day is the oldest wound in our sector. Daily workers and hostesses are sometimes paid a week later, sometimes a month later, sometimes only after calling the agency again and again. For someone who lives on these jobs, that changes everything; they may come to the next event, but reluctantly, giving the minimum. Paying on time is the most basic trust you can build with a temporary team, and it costs nothing extra.
Then there is the question few people ask. If someone working for a day, or helping without pay, falls from a ladder or trips over a cable during setup, what happens? Permanent staff are insured, but the student, the young person from an association and the daily worker without a written contract can be left in a gap, and responsibility tends to come back to an organizer who has neither a contract nor a policy to point to. Short-term personal accident cover costs little, a one-page form clarifies who is responsible for what, and registering paid day staff properly for social security is possible in most countries. When these are skipped, difficulty is rarely the reason; nobody saw these people as a line in the budget.
Volunteers are not a way of saving on paid staff either, and work that requires expertise or carries responsibility belongs to professionals, even when they are hired only for the project.
What does a young person learn about our industry on their first day?
We complain constantly, in tourism and events, about the tourism workforce shortage and how hard qualified people are to find. A large part of the temporary workforce walked away when events stopped during the pandemic and did not come back, and part of today’s shortage, which any honest look at event trends for 2027 has to include, comes from there. Part of it is older: graduates do not stay, and those who stay often leave within a few years, for reasons ranging from pay to working hours to seasonality.
Believe me, the first contact is one of those reasons. For many young people, their first taste of our industry is a day as a hostess or a student helper at a festival or congress. If that day means ten hours on their feet, no lunch, no thank you and payment a month late, that is what they conclude the industry is, and some of them would have made excellent event managers. The reverse is just as true. Plenty of people who now run projects began their event management career path exactly this way, at a fair, a congress or a concert setup, and stayed because someone on that first day explained what was happening and why it mattered. For cities that host events regularly, those people add up to something larger: a pool of hands who already know the venues and the routines, which counts for as much as halls and hotels when the next big event comes.
Why do so few organizers ask for last year’s team?
Temporary teams are built around the calendar and dissolve with it. What turns them into something more is memory: asking afterwards what was hard, with a few survey questions or simply a phone call, noting who came and how they worked, giving volunteers a certificate, paying on time and calling the good ones first. In my experience, a request to a hostess agency for “the same team as last time” is still rare enough that the agency is surprised to hear it, even though that team already knows the venue, the client and the routine, and arrives needing half the briefing.