The Volunteer Experience Is the Race Experience

The person who shapes a runner's race weekend most may be standing in a parking lot before sunrise with a clipboard and nursing a cup of coffee. 

They may be the course marshal keeping an intersection calm, the packet pickup volunteer answering the same question for the 300th or even 3000th time, the aid station lead watching cup inventory before the next wave arrives, or the finish chute volunteer moving tired runners through the end-of-race process.

Those volunteers are often as dedicated to your event as your staff itself. Yet for all that, they may have received one confirmation email, one reminder, a t-shirt, and a loose promise that someone would explain the job on site. Then race day arrives, and they become part of your brand. 

That is the volunteer experience in many endurance events today. If all you do is count how many people you need, assign them to stations, send the reminder, and hope the plan holds, you’re seriously undervaluing this critical part of your event. 

Meanwhile, whether or not you have a sophisticated volunteer management process, participants experience the whole thing differently. They feel whether volunteers are prepared and whether the course marshal knows the answer to their question. When the aid station is not ready or your packet pickup line is backed up, or the only way to solve a problem is visiting three different tents, they know something is wrong. 

Much like the platform you use to manage your event, your volunteers are an experience layer. When they feel informed, useful, and connected, your event feels stronger. When they feel confused, unsupported, or invisible, participants feel that wobble.

Volunteer problems become participant problems

Volunteer shortages have already changed race operations. For example, Triathlete reported that organizers of an Ironman event reduced and spread out aid stations when they could not fully staff the two-day event. The same article reported that events have had to cancel after recruiting only 20% of its minimum volunteer capacity. 

Every endurance event has its own market, community, and staffing reality. Still, the lesson carries across race formats: a volunteer gap rarely stays behind the curtain. It becomes a participant wondering why the race feels less buttoned up than the emails promised.

Runners do not separate paid staff, volunteers, contractors, sponsors, city partners, and vendors in the middle of race weekend. They remember the experience. That experience is an extension of your brand.

The impact can be dramatic. For example, a prepared volunteer makes the event feel energizing and on-track. A confused volunteer meanwhile can make your whole event feel confused or even mismanaged. 

That puts volunteer management inside the work of safety, retention, participant trust, and brand delivery.

Repeat volunteers need meaning and management

Volunteers return when the experience gives them purpose, connection, clarity, and confidence.

A 2025 study of Ultra trailrunning volunteers found that community participation and personal experiences were among the strongest motivations. Community participation, personal experiences, volunteering tradition, age, and lower egoism predicted intention to volunteer again.

For an endurance event, those findings translate into everyday operational choices. They mean that you need clear:
Role descriptions to tell volunteers what they are signing up for. Is it cheering, lifting, checking credentials, answering participant questions, managing a group, or handling a safety-sensitive position? Be sure to include all the details 

Targeted reminders to tell them what they need on event day. It includes information on where to park, when to arrive, who leads the shift, and what to do if plans change.

Check-in process to tell your team who showed up and where gaps remain. 

Specific thank-you followup to tell volunteers their work had value.

That is what respect looks like in volunteer operations.

Treat volunteers like a segment

Many events still manage volunteers in a separate spreadsheet that wakes up a few weeks before race day. That creates more work than it saves, without even getting started on why that data lives in a spreadsheet.

Just like your customers, volunteers have histories. They have preferences. They have group affiliations, attendance patterns, role experience, and future potential. 

Someone can volunteer at your spring 10K, run your fall half marathon, bring a corporate group next year, support a charity partner, buy merchandise for a friend and then volunteer again, or alternatively show up to volunteer for the first time with no prior interactions. When all of those interactions live in separate places, you lose the shape of the relationship. 

In fact, you need to track the core signals that help you act, like:

• Who returned from last year
• Who checked in and completed a shift
• Which roles they worked
• Which groups filled assignments reliably
• Which volunteers prefer packet pickup, course support, medical, expo, or finish-line roles
• Which participants also volunteer across your event portfolio
• Which volunteers might respond to credits, perks, leadership opportunities, or early registration access

That information helps you stop rebuilding the volunteer base from zero. It also helps you communicate with more precision. One of haku’s customers even said that they do literally treat volunteers like a segment of their audience:

“When we transitioned to haku, we started registering all of our events of our volunteers through haku, just like we do our race participants. “

The volunteer lifecycle

By race week, your volunteer system is mostly revealing the choices you made earlier.

If the roles you defined are too vague, people ask basic questions late. If credentials were collected manually, approvals get stressful and provisioning access to kiosks and terminals can get difficult. These and many more challenges can be prevented before race week if you communicate properly across the volunteer lifecycle. 

Build the volunteer system before you need it

Endurance events will always involve some race-week improvisation because life happens.  Weather changes, people cancel, sometimes roads shift, or a bus runs late. The plan has to bend, but that doesn’t mean you can afford to implement systems that break under pressure.

When your volunteer plan depends on heroic staff, scattered spreadsheets, and one mass email packed with every detail, you put extra pressure on the people carrying the most visible parts of race weekend. So don’t do that! Treat volunteers as a core experience audience. You wouldn’t include “what to do if the wind is 50 kph” as a line item in participant instructions! You would send an update message to your runners. Do the same for your volunteers. 

And look, your runners may never use the phrase volunteer management. They will describe the outcomes they see in their own language: packet pickup moved fast. The aid station was ready. The turn was clear. The finish line felt organized. 

The race felt like it had its act together.

Ready to make volunteer management easier?

haku helps endurance events coordinate, communicate with, and retain volunteers from the same platform they use to manage registration, event operations, CRM, and participant engagement. See how haku can help your team simplify volunteer management, strengthen race-day operations, and connect volunteer engagement with endurance CRM insights.

Or, if you’re ready to chat, we’re ready to talk. Request a demo with haku today.

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