Picture this: an amazingly well-run golf tournament, where the golfers are excited, treated like VIPs and everything is running exactly according to schedule. Now imagine this: a well-intentioned event where nothing is exactly coordinated and the golfers are a bit let-down and the golf course staff is not delivering and the tournament committee is stressing out. The difference between these two scenes: Volunteers. Volunteers are utterly essential to every facet of creating a professionally-run golf tournament from securing sponsorships to event-day orchestration.
While you may think you’re doing yourself a favor by disregarding volunteers to save time, you couldn’t be more wrong. Volunteers make up the vast majority of your tournament-day work force and provide valuable connections and ideas that every tournament cannot exist without. It takes much longer to flesh out the seemingly endless details of a tournament than you would initially assume and if there are very few, uninformed volunteers, chances are that one or two committee members will wind up doing all the work. Even we, as professional tournament planners, rely on a group of at least 4-8 individuals to assist in delivering a successful event.
Next, we’ll discuss what types of people to select as volunteers, how to maintain their accountability and how to keep volunteers involved and constructive.