3 Steps for Successful Rodeo Volunteering

It takes a lot of work and helping hands to make your rodeo run.

You probably already have relationships with local groups and organizations that volunteer regularly at your rodeo. As you continue working with these people, you also want to keep expanding your network of volunteers to ensure that your needs are met each year.

Successfully organizing volunteers comes down to three things: recruiting, communicating, and thanking them.

Recruit

Everything starts with recruiting volunteers. It’s a lot of work to get volunteers signed up, organized into shifts, and all of that communicated.

Start with an online sign-up form to simplify your volunteer organization. With your form, you’ll list jobs and shift times that people can sign up for. You won’t have to cross reference or remember everybody’s specific shift requests. All you’ll see is a report of what jobs and shifts are filled and what jobs and shifts remain.

The next task is getting volunteers to sign up. As you’re publicizing your event, publicize your volunteer opportunities. You’ll connect with volunteers that are passionate about your rodeo and excited about being part of the behind-the-scenes work.

Other volunteers are looking for volunteering opportunities to help bolster their resume or give back to the community.

To reach both of these types of volunteers, include a link to your volunteer form on your site. Ensure that it’s easy to find, so volunteers can quickly and simply sign-up for jobs and shifts.

Sometimes high schoolers and college students are required to do community service hours as part of their coursework.

Connect with teachers or professors focused on agriculture to reach students at your local schools. Again, you can send them a link to your volunteer form to make it easy for students to sign up.

Communicate

Once you have volunteers enlisted, you’ll need to coordinate training and send reminders about their shift.

Clear communication about expectations, advice on handling common situations that arise, and reminders about shift times help your volunteers be confident and stay engaged.

It’s easy to coordinate via email. Be sure to use volunteer software that makes it easy to email all of your volunteers at once. Mass email communication makes it easy to send one email at once without worrying about making sure you BCCed everyone to protect their privacy.

Thank

Volunteers give their time and energy to making your event a positive experience for everyone attending. Show them appreciation – provide food, snacks, and drinks during their volunteer shift to keep them going. 

You can go further to offer perks. Consider a discount code or early access for tickets or registration for your event, a party, raffle, swag, welcome gift, gift cards, or other ideas you have.

You can even highlight the perks you offer as part of your recruiting process.

Volunteer Management Simplified

Choosing the right software can make coordinating with volunteers easier and save you a lot of time. You’ll also want to ensure that you’re not adding too big of a line item to your budget.

Luckily, Come Volunteer is an affordable option. When you use Rodeo Ticket’s ticketing software for online sales, you get free access to Come Volunteer’s software.

With Come Volunteer, you can create online volunteer sign-up forms, create jobs, schedule shifts for each job, and email your volunteers. You can even add users and control access permissions to coordinate with volunteers across your team. 

Some volunteer management software limits the number of jobs, shifts, forms, email addresses, and email sends you can use through the system. Come Volunteer has no limits for any of these when you use Rodeo Ticket for online ticket sales.