As most of you know, we’ve been dangling the release of up to 400 extra General Admission tickets if we get enough volunteers for critical year-round, event lead-up and on-site roles.
Unfortunately this effort did not yield the desired results. Although lots of people have stepped up over the last couple of months to help out in exchange for a ticket (Thank you!), too many of these key roles remain unfilled or were filled too late. This means that many existing vollies have had to step up and go above and beyond (again) as the stuff still needs doing!
So instead we have chosen to look after our existing people who are already overworked and put as much emphasis on them being able to enjoy the Burn as is possible instead of adding more GA into the mix. We want them to have fun and we want them to want to come back, year after year. We also needed some of the year-round positions to be filled earlier to assist with meaningful shadowing so more effective succession and eventual handover can occur (such as Facilitator 2IC roles, some of which have been advertised for months) and some Facilitators and Team Leads have had no back up or help during this busy lead-up period.
As the saying goes, those who really want to come will succeed in getting a ticket. There are still roles advertised, many with tickets.
We often hear from those who have not been to a Burn event before that they just ”wanted to see what it was all about before volunteering”. This is not how this event works, you can and should volunteer from day one (or even before, many take on roles before ever having been to a Burn). Any Burn event is about participation, YOU are the attraction, YOU make it happen.
We also know that some of you applied but never heard back. It’s a bit chicken and egg, we don’t have enough volunteers to help manage the volunteers either, so here are reasons for why this could have happened:
- Shotgun approach whereby someone applies for say, Effigy, but can only be available during the event (Effigy build starts a few weeks prior).
- Applied for a role needing specific experience/qualifications and say they have them but they don’t or their certification has expired.
- Multiple role applications by the same person without reading the Job Description, or are not suitable for the role for various reasons which would have been obvious to them if they had read the Job Description.
- The vollie team, team lead or Facilitator decided against that person, but did not get back to them (on us, no doubt and unhelpful if you’re not been told you were unsuccessful). See point about not enough vollies to manage the influx. We have made huge strides in this area with the introduction of Airtable though. Not yet perfect, but darn better than what we had.
We thought offering many more tickets associated with key roles would do it, but alas no. Other events close to Kiwiburn have also caused a drain on what is already a limited pool of people. So this year Kiwiburn will be a bit smaller, more manageable and allowing us to concentrate on getting the process better and better. We don’t think that’s a bad thing.
