We chat to Charity Concierge – the fundraising initiative that’s revolutionising festivals

Anyone who’s attended a UK music festival knows that the whole experience can actually be pretty hard work. Lugging heavy bags across a town-sized area of muddy fields isn’t exactly for the faint-hearted, for example. Likewise, putting up a tent in gale force winds is a surefire way to dampen the festival buzz, if only temporarily. Not forgetting the slog of waiting in hefty bar queues while potentially missing precious moments of your favourite band’s performance.

Some might say these pain points are a small(ish) price to pay for the incredible experience of attending a festival. But what if we told you there was a way to have your cake, and eat it too? 

Introducing: Charity Concierge, an initiative from Child.org that provides a range of luxury festival services in order to raise money for their important cause. 

Services include tent-pitching (phew!), buggy transport (hurrah!) and even drinks collection so you don’t have to lose your front-stage spot mid performance (#blessed).

Below, we chat to Hattie Rowan, Communications & Fundraising Officer for Child.org, who tells us all about the awesome festival initiative and the charity behind it. There are some great insights here, especially for any event organisers looking for tips on working with volunteers.

⛺Let’s go.

✅ Key takeaways

🙌 Posting on local Facebook groups can be a great way to reach volunteers. You may also be able to get a Google Ads grant to supercharge your volunteer recruitment efforts.

❓Did you know… Ticket Tailor can be used as a sign-up tool for volunteers? Hattie talks about how our platform provided the perfect place for them to seamlessly manage their volunteer recruitment programme. Nice.

💡 When working with volunteers, it’s important to understand that some roles may be harder to recruit for – Hattie says they’re working on marketing some of their less popular roles to the right people.

📣Word-of-mouth can be a really powerful tool when it comes to growing your volunteer programme. Case in point: many of Charity Concierge’s volunteers not only return year-on-year, but bring along friends with them. 

What’s Charity Concierge all about?

Charity Concierge is a fundraising initiative to raise money for international charity Child.org. We recruit volunteers to help us run ‘luxury’ services across festivals in the UK. These include a buggy taxi service, a tent-pitching service and a drinks delivery service (so festival goers can keep their place in front of the stage!). 

Can you tell us more about Child.org?

Mothers and babies still die from preventable causes, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. To help change this, Child.org works to improve access to, and quality of, maternal and child health services in Kenya. We work with pregnant women, communities and government, and champion community-based solutions. 

One of these solutions is our Team Mum Pregnant Women’s Groups, which bring pregnant women together over six sessions to provide critical maternal and child health information. The groups are a space for women to learn, share experiences and support one another during their pregnancy journey. Over 10,000 women have joined a Team Mum Pregnant Women’s Group since 2019.

That’s incredible 👏. What are the fundraising targets for an initiative like Charity Concierge?

Our fundraising target across four festivals this year is £105,000 (and we are on track to surpass this target!). We will be able to make an estimate for next year’s target once this festival season is over. However, given our success in the last few years, I imagine next year’s target will likely be a bit more, or the same.

It’s worth mentioning that we also run another fundraising initiative called Ride Africa. This is a cycling challenge which takes riders through some of Kenya’s biggest and best national parks (this year our cyclists are riding from Lake Nakuru to the Maasai Mara in five days). Alongside their fees, riders must fundraise £1,800 for Child.org.

We also raise money through our regular givers, one-off donations and partnerships.

Sounds like you’re doing amazing work. We’re sure our community would love to know more about how you go about attracting volunteers?

We market Charity Concierge on our social media pages (Instagram and Facebook), and run Google Ads. As we have many returners, we get a lot of volunteers who bring friends each year and spread the word for us. We also reach a lot of new volunteers by posting on local Facebook groups (this has proved to be a very successful marketing tactic!).

This year, approximately 50% of our volunteers had volunteered with us previously.

👀Ticket Tailor tip: Like the idea of harnessing word-of-mouth promotion, like Hattie describes? You might find our article on word of mouth marketing useful.

Any specific advice for those looking to recruit volunteers?

Posting in local Facebook groups is an excellent way to find brand new volunteers, as it is a free way to market. Some charities also are entitled to a Google Ad Grant which is of course a great way to reach more people.

And of course, if you make sure your event is welcoming and fun, volunteers will return and they’ll also bring their friends!

Makes sense! What are the biggest challenges you face when it comes to actually running your concierge service?

The biggest challenge is learning to juggle several challenges at once as a small team: festivals are busy events with many things happening simultaneously, so we have to be able to put out several fires (metaphorically!) at once.

Another pain point tends to be around recruiting for less popular roles. While it’s easy to find volunteers to drive golf buggy taxis, it is more of a challenge to find volunteers for our General Service roles, for example. We’re working on how we can market this role to the right audience.

How many events do you work with each year? 

This year, we will have covered four festivals: Latitude Festival, Camp Bestival Dorset, Wilderness Festival and Camp Bestival Shropshire. At all festivals we run our buggy taxi service (this is our most popular service), and at Latitude and Wilderness (because they’re bigger) we run our General Services. This includes helping festival-goers to pitch their tents, and getting their drinks for them in return for a donation. This year we launched a new, free service at Wilderness Festival: Team Mum Family Hubs which include changing stations for babies, and a calm space for mums to breastfeed.

We love the sound of that. Moving onto ticketing – why did you choose Ticket Tailor as your ticketing partner? 

We needed an easy and efficient way for our volunteers to sign up for Charity Concierge. After some research, we felt that Ticket Tailor seemed like it would offer a really smooth process that would both make our sign-up better for our volunteers, and make the process easier and quicker for our team to manage. (This is especially important given we are a very small team.) We also found that Ticket Tailor was more reasonably priced than other ticketing partners, without compromising on quality. 

That’s great to hear. Have you found any Ticket Tailor features particularly useful?

The best Ticket Tailor feature is their speedy customer service! It’s incredible how quickly our questions are answered, which means we can really rely on Ticket Tailor if we’re experiencing any issues, and we know we can sort out problems quickly. This is crucial when working in events!

Finally, what does the future hold for Charity Concierge? 

Charity Concierge is only going to get better! Whilst we will always strive to maintain the community feel and familial atmosphere amongst our Charity Concierge volunteers, we hope to bring Child.org and our services to more festivals in the future. Our fundraising total has been growing year-on-year – and long may it continue!

Hear, hear! 🙌 Thanks so much for chatting with us, Hattie! 

Find out more about Charity Concierge and Child.org. 

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