Coordinating volunteers and helpers: roles, shifts and the briefing

Jobs written as roles with times, a name and a backup on each, one point person for the day, a short written briefing, and thanks afterward. It works the same for two friends at a dinner and fourteen parents at a school supper.

Roles before people Understand

An event can be short of help with plenty of people on hand: people arrive without a job, and some jobs belong to nobody. Volunteer Maine, the state's service commission, draws the contrast in its training slides: assigning tasks to whoever turns up, against deciding what you need and creating positions to fill (Volunteer Maine's Volunteer Position Descriptions slides). The University of Kansas Community Tool Box says the same for fundraisers: identify specific roles rather than recruiting as many volunteers as possible (the Community Tool Box's fundraiser section). This chapter follows that order. Jobs first, then roles, then names.

A volunteer role is one job written down with four things: what the person does, from when until when, where, and who does it. "Help in the kitchen" is not a role. "Kitchen, 4:00 to 6:45 pm: boil pasta in batches, drain, pan it for the serving line; ask the person in charge before changing anything" is. The Arkansas extension service's event checklist has the simplest form of it: a list of Before, During and After tasks with a column headed "Who Will Do It" (University of Arkansas Extension's event checklist). Its During column includes greeting people as they arrive, serving refreshments, and "Clean up, lock up facility", a job that is easy to forget until 9:00 pm.

What a role says it does not include

Volunteer Maine lists reasons to write a position down. It communicates what is expected, supports training, helps with risk management, and "Sets Limits". The limit matters at a small event as much as a large one. The person at the ticket table is not also the person who runs to the store. The helper watching the children's corner does not leave it to serve dessert. Writing "does not include" on a role is how two jobs stop quietly becoming one.

These are common roles, not a required set. A dinner for six has two: the host, and perhaps someone who clears. The roles sheet starts with the roles your setup answers suggest and lets you add, rename or delete rows. Convention

How many people a role needs

No source gives a ratio of helpers to guests for a private event, so the count comes from the work. Ask three questions of each role: can one person do it at the busiest moment; does it run longer than one person should stand there; and does it need two people for a reason other than workload (cash counted by two, children watched by two). A serving line for 120 people over an hour needs more hands than one person refilling a buffet for 20. Write the number in the "how many" column, and the sheet totals it.

Shifts, backups and the point person

A shift is a block of time one person covers in a role. Shifts matter once an event runs longer than about three hours, or once the people who set up are not the people who clean up. Two rules make shifts work. First, overlap them, so the incoming person arrives before the outgoing one leaves. Second, hand over in person: the outgoing helper says what is running low and what is unfinished. We use a 15-minute overlap as a starting point; no source fixes one. Convention

A backup is the person who takes a role if its owner cannot. Write the backup's name in the row, not in your head. A backup can be someone who holds a different role at a quieter time, or someone who has said "call me if you need me". At a dinner for six, the backup for every role is the host, and that is fine to write down.

The point person

The point person is the one helper everyone else goes to on the day, and who can make a decision when the host is busy. West Chester University's event guide asks, among its first planning questions, who the point person for the event will be (West Chester University's event planning resource). The Community Tool Box puts a "Designated operations lead" on its event operations checklist. The point person does not have to be the host. At a birthday where the host is the guest of honor's daughter, the point person may be better as a brother or a friend, because the host is likely to be pulled into every conversation.

The point person needs three things written down: what they can decide alone (move the cake, open a second drink cooler, send someone to the store), what they check with the host first (spending more than a set amount, ending early), and what goes straight to the emergency plan (an injury, lightning, a missing child, covered in The contingency plan). The decisions themselves belong to who decides in The event brief; the point person carries them out on the day.

Asking people to help

Volunteer Maine lists four ways people are recruited: personal networking, special events, community presentations, and advertising and posting. For one event, the first does most of the work. Ask people directly, by name, for a role with a time. A general call ("we need volunteers") produces people without jobs; a specific ask ("can you run the drink table from 6:00 to 8:00?") produces a yes or a no you can plan around.

A recruitment message is the ask, written. Volunteer Maine says it answers four questions: what is the problem, what is the solution, what is involved, and what do you need me to do. For a school dinner that can be four sentences:

1. The parent group raises money for classroom supplies each spring. (The problem.)
2. A spaghetti dinner on a Friday evening is how we do it. (The solution.)
3. Two shifts, about three hours each, in the school cafeteria and kitchen. (What is involved.)
4. Can you work the serving line on the second shift, 6:30 to 9:00 pm, on the night of the dinner? (What we need you to do.)

The role, the time and the place are what let the person say yes or no.

The ask also sets expectations. A volunteer guide written for Peace Corps Moldova by a training institute, and hosted on the Peace Corps site, lists reasons volunteers leave, among them not feeling welcome, getting no support for their tasks, no thanks, and a large gap between how a role was presented and what it turned out to be (Volunteer Management, a guide published by Peace Corps Moldova). Its disclaimer says the views are the authors', not official Peace Corps opinion. The gap is the one a written role prevents: if the ask says "serving line" and the person ends up scrubbing pots for three hours, the next ask gets a no.

Family and friends at a private party

Family helpers are volunteers in every way that matters on the day, and the same written roles work for them. The difference is tone, not structure. "Can you be in charge of the drinks cooler from 2:00 to 4:00, and hand it to Mom's cousin after the speeches?" is a role with a time and a handover, written as a family request. What changes at a private party is the law and the paperwork: a group's volunteer policies, screening and liability rules belong to organizations, and are covered below for the events that have them.

The briefing

A briefing tells each helper, before they start, what they need to do their role and what to do when something goes wrong. University of Florida's 4-H extension guide on volunteer orientation says orientation covers both the general information every volunteer needs and the specifics of their role, and quotes the university's policy that the services expected of each volunteer should be given to them in writing (UF/IFAS Extension's volunteer orientation guide). The guide is marked as an archival copy; we found no current replacement. It also notes that orientation overlaps with recruitment, because people need some of it to decide whether to say yes.

For one event, the briefing has two parts: a written note that each helper gets ahead of time, and a few minutes together at the start of each shift. West Chester's guide puts a meeting with volunteers about the plan and their roles in the week of the event, and tells groups to "Create an FAQ for your volunteers". Northern Kentucky University's guide says to remind every volunteer the day before when to show up (Northern Kentucky University's How to Plan an Event).

The briefing checklist carries these lines, and the roles sheet has a "briefed" box for each row. For a dinner, the briefing is one text message: "Could you help clear after the main course, around 8:15? I'll handle dishes after." For a volunteer event, it is a page per role and five minutes at the start of the shift. The run sheet for the day, in The run sheet, uses the same names in its "who" column, so the two documents should agree.

Helpers who handle food

Helpers who cook or serve need a few rules that matter more than any other part of the briefing. The federal booklet written for this situation is FSIS's Cooking for Groups: A Volunteer's Guide to Food Safety, which covers family reunions, church dinners and community gatherings, with food made at home and brought, or made at the event (FSIS's Cooking for Groups booklet). It is the March 2001 edition, slightly revised in 2011, and still the current FSIS version.

• A person in charge. The booklet says to choose a person in charge who contacts the local health department, instructs volunteers, and oversees preparation, service and cleanup. North Dakota State's extension sheet adds that this person should be familiar with food service sanitation and hold a short training session (NDSU Extension's Keep Food Safe at Community Dinners and Potlucks). The person in charge of food is a role on the sheet, often different from the point person.
• Handwashing. FSIS's booklet says to wash hands for 20 seconds. Where the venue has no sink near the serving area, the setup role includes a handwashing station.
• No one handles food while ill. The University of Minnesota's extension page says not to handle, prepare or serve food if you or someone in your household is sick with vomiting or diarrhea, or has been diagnosed with a foodborne illness, and to wait at least 24 hours after all symptoms stop (University of Minnesota Extension's Cooking safely for a crowd). Put it in the recruitment message, so a helper who wakes up sick knows to call the backup rather than come in.
• One utensil per dish, and no bare hands on ready-to-eat food. Both are Minnesota's; the utensil rule also keeps a dish's allergens with that dish.
• The clock. Someone on the serving line watches how long food has been out. FSIS's limit is 2 hours, or 1 hour above 90°F (food safety at a glance has the table).

The temperatures, the buffet rules and make-ahead cooking are in Feeding a crowd. This section is about who does what: the briefing tells kitchen and serving helpers these rules, and the roles sheet makes sure the person in charge is named.

Money and the cash table

A fundraiser's helpers handle money, and money is where a volunteer can be put in a bad position by a loose plan. The Community Tool Box says to decide in advance who authorizes expenses, who handles cash, how payments and refunds are processed, and how the cash is reconciled. It names the principle separation of duties: no one person collects, records, reconciles and deposits. That protects the group, and it protects the volunteer from being the only person who could have miscounted.

• Start with a known float. Northern Kentucky's guide says that if you take cash at the door, arrange change and a secure place for the money. Count the starting change with two people and write it down.
• Two people count together. At the end, two people count the cash together, in one place, and both write the total and sign the count sheet. The two-person count follows from the Community Tool Box's separation of duties; the signed sheet is our convention. Convention
• Deposit promptly. Northern Kentucky's guide says to deposit money on the next business day.
• Write the time of the count into the run sheet. A count with no time slides to "whenever cleanup is done", when people are tired.

A raffle or sales table has its own rules by state; Permits and insurance covers them. The budget's income lines, which the count feeds, are in The budget.

Helpers and children

Two different situations get mixed together here. One is children as guests, with their own parents or carers; the other is adults whose role is to look after other people's children, in a children's area, a craft table or a supervised corner. The second raises the question of screening.

Screening is the checks an organization runs before letting a person take a role: an application, references, an interview, a background check, or some set of these. Whether adults who work with children are screened, and how, is the organization's decision: a school or district, a congregation, a league, a scout group. CDC's guide on preventing child sexual abuse within youth-serving organizations lists six components of an organization's policies, and the first is screening and selecting employees and volunteers; the others are guidelines on interactions, monitoring behavior, ensuring safe environments, responding to concerns and allegations, and training (CDC's 2007 guide for youth-serving organizations). The guide dates from 2007; we found no newer CDC edition.

For an event run by or held at such an organization, the step is to ask for its volunteer policy before assigning anyone to a children's role, and to follow it. A school's parent group asks the school office; a congregation asks its office or its children's ministry lead. Ask the authority Do not set a screening rule of your own in place of theirs.

A family event usually has no organization and no screening policy. What it needs instead is a named adult watching each children's space at each time, written as a role with shifts, so "everyone is watching" does not become no one watching. A space with a hazard, such as water, a road or a grill, gets its own watcher. This is our convention for planning; it is not a safety standard. Convention What to do if a child goes missing is in The contingency plan, and the meeting point it asks for belongs in every helper's briefing.

The Volunteer Protection Act

People often ask whether volunteers can be sued. The federal statute on the question is the Volunteer Protection Act of 1997. We state it here as its text states it, as a fact about the law, not as advice about any event.

Under 42 U.S.C. § 14503, a volunteer of a nonprofit organization or a governmental entity is not liable for harm caused by an act or omission on the organization's behalf, if all four of these hold (42 U.S.C. § 14503 at Cornell's Legal Information Institute):

1. the volunteer was acting within the scope of their responsibilities for the organization;
2. where a license or certification was appropriate or required for the activity, the volunteer had it;
3. the harm was not caused by willful or criminal misconduct, gross negligence, reckless misconduct, or a conscious, flagrant indifference to the rights or safety of the person harmed; and
4. the harm was not caused by the volunteer operating a motor vehicle, vessel, aircraft or other vehicle for which the state requires an operator's license or insurance.

Three more points from the same section. The Act does not affect the liability of the organization itself: subsection (d) says nothing in it affects the liability of any nonprofit organization or governmental entity. It does not affect a suit the organization brings against its own volunteer (subsection (c)). And states may attach conditions, such as requiring risk-management procedures including mandatory volunteer training, or requiring the organization to provide insurance or another secure source of recovery (subsection (e)).

The definitions are in 42 U.S.C. § 14505 (42 U.S.C. § 14505, the Act's definitions). A "volunteer" receives no compensation other than reasonable reimbursement of expenses, and no other thing of value in place of compensation worth more than $500 a year; the term includes directors, officers and trustees. A "nonprofit organization" is a 501(c)(3) organization, or a not-for-profit organized for public benefit and operated primarily for charitable, civic, educational, religious, welfare or health purposes. Friends helping at a private party are not volunteers of a nonprofit or a governmental entity, so the Act's text does not describe them.

Two practical points follow from the text, and neither is advice. A helper who drives to pick up the bread is outside the Act's protection for harm caused by that driving. And because the organization's own liability is untouched, the group's insurance question remains (Permits and insurance).

Thanks

Thanks are the last role on the sheet, and the one most often dropped. The university guides put them in the after-event list: Nicholls State says to send thank-you notes to speakers, volunteers and funders (Nicholls State's event planning guide), and Syracuse lists thank-you notes to volunteers after cleanup (Syracuse University's event planning checklist). The Peace Corps-hosted guide's list of reasons volunteers leave includes work that was not appreciated, with no thank you.

Two kinds of thanks, both short. In person, on the day, at the end of each shift: the point person or the host says thank you to each helper by name before they go. In writing, within a few days: a note or message that names what the person did ("you ran the drink table for three hours and the ice held out all evening"). Northern Kentucky also suggests an evaluation meeting with everyone who helped, within a week, about what went well and what to improve; The run sheet has a short form of it. A helper's answer to "what would you change?" is the best input next year's roles sheet can get.

See it: Dana's fourteen, Marcus's one, the Okafors' pond See it

Practice: fill the roles sheet Practice

Minimum: every job on the roles sheet has a name and a time, and each helper has been told their role in writing. Time: 15 minutes for a dinner; one to two hours for a volunteer event, plus the time to ask people. Materials: your event brief, the start and end times, the guest count, and a list of the people who might help.

1. List the jobs. Walk through the day from setup to lock-up and write every job you see. Use the roles table above as a prompt.
2. Turn jobs into roles. For each, write what it involves, what it does not, from and until. Group small jobs that one person can do at the same time.
3. Set how many. Ask the three questions: the busiest moment, the length, and whether it needs two.
4. Put in names and backups. Your own name goes on every role nobody else has. Mark the point person and, if food is served by helpers, the person in charge of food.
5. Send the asks. One message per person, with the role, the time and the place.
6. Send the briefing. Use the briefing checklist; tick "briefed" on each row when it is sent.

Your event Your event

Check your work Check your work

Criteria

• Does every job on the sheet have a name and a from-and-until time, or does the sheet say "just me" with the jobs listed?
• Does each role say what it does not include, where two jobs could blur?
• Is there a point person, with what they can decide alone written down?
• Where helpers handle food, is a person in charge named, and does the briefing include the illness rule and handwashing?
• Where helpers handle cash, do two people count it, at a time written on the run sheet?
• Where adults look after other people's children, has the organization's policy been asked for?
• Has each helper had their role in writing?

Worked example

Dana's sheet has 14 names in two shifts with a 15-minute overlap, Dana as point person, a person in charge of food on each shift, the cash count at 8:15 pm by the treasurer and a second-shift volunteer, and a "briefed" tick on every row a week before. It passes. It does not settle the parent group's legal status or the district's policy; those are written as open questions with who settles them. Marcus's three-row sheet passes too: every job has a name and a time.

Common mistakes

• A list of names without jobs. People arrive and stand by the door. Write the role first.
• The host as point person at their own celebration. The host is pulled into every conversation; pick someone who is not the center of attention.
• No backup for the one role the event depends on. Usually the kitchen or the cash table.
• Cleanup left to "everyone". Name people, and an end time that matches the venue's checkout.
• One person counts the cash alone after everyone has left. Two people, together, at a set time.
• Setting your own screening rule for a children's role at an organization's event. Ask for theirs.

What is still unresolved

The times on the roles sheet come from the day's schedule, which The run sheet writes out by the clock. What helpers do when something goes wrong is set in The contingency plan. Food temperatures and the buffet rules are in Feeding a crowd. Whether the Volunteer Protection Act or a state law covers a helper, and what the organization's own liability and insurance are, are for its officers, its insurer or an attorney.

Knowledge check and scenario

Checklist

• The helpers sheet has a name and a time on every job, or says "just me" with the jobs listed.
• A point person is named at the top of the sheet.
• Each helper has their role, time and who to ask, in writing.
• Where helpers handle food, cash or children, the person in charge, the two-person count or the organization's policy is on the sheet.
• Thank-yous are on the day-after list.
• I wrote a role card for each role. (Go deeper; optional)