● Keeping volunteers on board is hard work

Gunnar Kloppenborg Madsen

Managing Director SPOT Festival

Many European festivals have relied hugely on volunteers to help run their events in the past but now some are facing challenges after the corona lockdowns of the past 2 years have taken away the eagerness for people to lend a hand.

- “Corona has made us more individualised. You prioritise your time more and may also have acquired different habits than you had before corona”, says Esben Marcher, Head of the Danish Music Organisation Dansk Live and continued “We get reports from some places that former volunteers say that this year they want the full festival experience rather than taking a break along the way, because now we haven’t been to a festival for two years”

While some have struggled to attract volunteers, others seem to have been more successful. Every year, there are 16,000 volunteers at SmukFest in Skanderborg and this year they managed to keep the same recruitment levels. “But it has required a lot of hard work with social events and intensive communication between the festival office and the volunteers over the long shutdown periods” says spokesman Søren Eskildsen.

The German showcase event Reeperbahn Festival has experienced similar problems when it comes to staff with CEO Alexander Schulz saying that Stage-hands, riggers, stage-managers, backliners, front of house staff etc. have vanished forever due to the pandemic. With about 60 venues in four days to be equipped and simultaneously managed, this year’s event has been extremely hard to set up.

VIP-News spoke to Danish Live Industry veteran Gunnar Kloppenborg Madsen, who has been working in the Live Music industry for four decades and is Managing Director of the Danish showcase festival SPOT, about the major challenges of attracting festival volunteers.

“The younger generations are increasingly looking at the concrete, economic trade-off between tasks and their own interests”

Q1

One of the major problems at events and festivals in Denmark and other countries is the lack of volunteers, can you describe how big the problem is from your point of view?

The answer depends on whether we are talking about a continuous decrease in the number of volunteers due to structural and fundamental changes in the sector, whether it is only a corona-related decrease, whether the relative decrease is more about an increase in the number of operators who build on voluntary labour or a combination of them all. This could be a big problem for the experience industry as a whole, both financially and in terms of how it works.

Q2

You have been quoted saying the problem is not just COVID related but has been a pre-pandemic problem as well. If it’s not related to COVID then why do you think it has become hard to find volunteers?

A paradigm shift from value-based (altruistic) motives for volunteering to using volunteering as an economic negotiation model for both parties. Cheap labour for the provider and easy access to cultural experiences for the “volunteer”!

The younger generations are increasingly looking at the concrete, economic trade-off between tasks and their own interests. They are trained for that. In Denmark, we are really moving towards smaller cohorts, so numerically there is a lack of hands.

Q3

Why do festivals and other major events need volunteers? Is it not possible to get professional staff for all jobs?

This is probably also the way many promoters go. Restructuring of the business model, perhaps of the product range and the associated services, so that settlement, mediation, communication, and sales can be handled by paid employees. This is partly how it is already, where you pay sports clubs and associations to provide staff or develop alternative forms of payment and exchange deals.

But that development will be difficult to keep up with for many of the small organisers, so that diversity and renewal in the culture may be affected.

On the other hand, it can make room for grassroots efforts, where the volunteer’s connection to the event or festival becomes more natural.

What can festival organisers do to raise the amount of volunteers again?

Q4

Be good at segmenting which areas they want to use volunteers for and which they want to change the business model to use paid labour.

Be sharp in communication with your volunteers and be willing to stimulate the individual’s ambitions, resources, and sense of responsibility.