Volunteer and Human Resource Management
As the president of K-State’s Students for Environmental Action (SEA), I helped to organize our Earth Day Carnival in April 2019. For this event, our group set up tables with information and giveaways, and we invited a variety of different environmental and related organizations from around campus and Manhattan to run booths. One of our graduate student executive board members also gave tours of the green roofs she was working on.
This event had been a longer “Green Week” celebration for the past two years with a number of events scheduled throughout the week, and we had always had volunteers to help out with some of the events. As such, when working to plan the Carnival, we began to try to recruit volunteers. We created a sign-up Google Sheet and sent it out over our ListServ, asking for people’s names, email addresses, phone numbers, and the times that they would be available to help out. We also asked for people’s t-shirt sizes and said that the first twenty people to sign up would get free t-shirts.
Although relatively few people usually came to our group’s meetings, we technically had hundreds of people on our ListServ, and finding people to volunteer ended up being surprisingly easy. I believe that one of our executive board members might have also sent the sign-up sheet to members of her sorority, although I’m not completely sure.
We had had volunteers at past events to help run booths, etc., but as we grew closer to the carnival, we began to contemplate more what our volunteers this year would actually be doing. The groups attending the carnival would theoretically be running their own booths, and we would likely only need a few volunteers for our own tables. However, we already had a large number of people signed up to volunteer, and we decided that we would be able to find something for them to do. Shortly before the event, I sent an email out to all of the volunteers with general information about where we would be meeting, etc., and telling them that they would be helping to run our tables, hand out giveaways, and direct people to the carnival.
On the morning of the actual event, some of our executive board members arrived early and worked on setting up our tables. The volunteers began to arrive shortly after, and as each came we checked their name off of our list and gave them a t-shirt. One small issue was that the number of people who wanted each size of t-shirt did not always correspond with the number of t-shirts that we actually had in that size, but everyone, to my knowledge, was able to get a t-shirt that was at least close to their desired size.
Pretty soon, we had a significant number of volunteers, and many of them were bunched up behind our tables without much to do. We executive members had basically already set everything up by the time they arrived, and there were more of them than necessary to run the tables and hand out giveaways. However, some of them soon began to walk around nearby directing passersby to the event, with some even taking a sign to carry with them. I had to leave the event at around this time to go to class, but from what I heard from the other members of our executive team, it went well overall. We gave away of all of our giveaways and had a lot of people stop by. I do not believe that anyone mentioned anything afterward about how the volunteer situation worked out throughout the rest of the event, so all I can really assume is that it never became a significant issue.
While this experience ended up working out overall, with the volunteers finding ways to help out, this definitely taught me to seriously consider how many volunteers, if any, I would need for future events. We had looked for volunteers simply because we had always had them, but in reality we ended up only needing very few, if any, for the majority of the event. It was a bit awkward at the time, but we learned from this experience.