EP 38: Event Staffing with Lauren Batterby

Jeff: Welcome back to the Elevate Your Event Podcast, where we talk about all the various ways you can make your next fundraising event better. We have a super special guest this week — Lauren Batterby from Life Event Staffing. Also in studio is Elise Druckenmiller. I'm Jeff Porter from Handbid. Since we have Lauren from Life Event Staffing, I think we're going to talk about event staffing.

Lauren: Sounds great.

Jeff: Lauren, give us a little history on yourself and how you got into event staffing in the first place.

Lauren: Sure — let's go way back. I was looking for work and a recruiter brought me a job description that sounded perfect. I wanted to be an event manager, an event planner. I ticked all the boxes until it said 'tech savvy,' and I was like, that's not for me. The recruiter came back and said the company really wanted to talk to me and explain what they meant by tech savvy. And it was GiveSmart — they said tech savvy basically meant, 'Can you use an iPad or an iPhone?' I said, of course, I have both. They said, great, come in for an interview. That was it. I was with GiveSmart UK for about three or four years before they were acquired by Givergy. Givergy UK bought out GiveSmart UK, and I was then recruited to move to Atlanta to be operations manager for GiveSmart US — at the time they were staffing about three hundred fifty events a year. About eight months later, they were acquired by Community Brands. So I got the t-shirt — acquired twice within twelve months.

Jeff: And you survived both times.

Lauren: Survived both times. I became a regional operations manager and our staff expanded when they brought in Gesture and 501 Auctions. We went from about one hundred fifty staff to around four hundred fifty. I was working across the South and the Northeast — and then the pandemic hit. I went from managing about two hundred staff in my region to none overnight, because on-site events stopped. Community Brands treated me well and found me another role, but that just wasn't for me. What I knew was staffing, logistics, on-site, training. So I eventually went to work for another mobile bidding company, and then the same person who'd originally recruited me at GiveSmart — the one who explained what 'tech savvy' actually meant — reached out again. He said, 'We're struggling with on-site staff. Agencies just can't cut it. The people they're sending aren't experienced in our industry.' So I rounded up about forty people I knew and we did our first season staffing events. We proved we could train people on new technology. I put the word out that this model — auction-trained staff who could learn any platform — was available. That's how Life Event Staffing was born. Two and a half years later, we're now seven hundred fifty staff across the US and Canada.

Jeff: Seven hundred fifty staff. That is a lot of paperwork.

Lauren: It really is. I had a call this morning with an event planner who said, 'You're doing everything nobody else wants to do.' There is some truth in that.

Jeff: I want to highlight what you said, because it's important. The challenge for mobile bidding companies like Handbid was that charities started asking for staffing help — volunteers were unreliable or unskilled, so they wanted us to provide people for check-in, paddle raise, and checkout. And so platforms started looking at general staffing agencies. The same type of agency that checks your ticket at a basketball game or works a brand activation. Those people might watch some training videos on your software, but do they really know how to run an event? Do they understand best practices? Do they know how to make things flow? Often in those cases, they're no different from an untrained volunteer — and you're paying a lot for them.

Jeff: We experienced this firsthand back in 2011, 2012. We hired a staffing agency, sent two people to an event, and the feedback we got the following Monday was: 'Our staff knew more about your software than your staff.' We refunded the money and said this model isn't going to work. We felt like we couldn't ethically charge five hundred dollars per person per night for someone who had no experience with our software. So we ditched that model and decided we'd only provide on-site staff if they were people we personally knew and vetted. That meant flying people around — not cost effective, but that was the trade-off we were willing to make. And then along came you.

Lauren: When we first spoke, I came in honestly — maybe naively. But I had my experience and I understood the pain points. The platforms had gotten to a point where they weren't really making money on staffing. The clients wanted staff, but travel costs were so high it was often a loss. So I came in and said: look, we've proven we can learn any platform. These are people I've worked with for years. They've gone through all the same training I have, across multiple platforms. What's the risk? Even if I seem like another staffing agency — you've had one bad experience — let's try this on a different model, with experienced people. And there aren't many agencies doing it the way we do. We only do auctions. Before anyone joins our team, they need an internal referral from an existing team member and prior auction experience. We've now built our own auction training program because I ran out of people with existing auction experience — I think I've spoken to virtually every person who ever worked an auction event.

Jeff: It takes a certain personality type, right?

Lauren: Absolutely. You need that service-oriented mindset. Think about the type of person checking you in at a hotel — introducing themselves, asking how your day was, knows the reservation system, can get you set up and tell you where to go so you don't walk away from the desk looking around in circles. All of that, plus the ability to handle stress well and work in a fast-paced, fast-changing environment. They're not easy to find, but when we find them, we recruit them.

Jeff: And why do staff matter at all? We get asked this often: 'Can I just do this on my own?' Yes, you can. But should you? The better questions are: do you have enough experience? Do you understand best practices well enough to handle situations as they arise? Can you prevent problems because of experience? An experienced staff member walking into a venue immediately notices that you've put the check-in desk at the bottom of an escalator, or that the bar is before check-in. Those are things that will cause problems.

Lauren: Exactly. There are a few reasons to have staff, but the reason should never be 'the software is too complicated.' Handbid is not complicated. You don't need staff just to operate the software. But you might need staff because it's a small organization with limited volunteers, or because it's a once-a-year event and you don't want to focus your energy on learning software when you should be building donor relationships. Let the experts handle the technology and the what-ifs, while you go work the room.

Jeff: And some people, after all the pre-event work, just want to enjoy the night. I empathize with that.

Lauren: I always admired event planners. I wanted to be one. But it's hard enough managing the fundraising aspect alone — never mind the sponsors, guest list, tables, entertainment, venue, catering. It's mind-blowing.

Jeff: One of the things experienced staff know immediately when they walk into a venue is whether the layout is going to create a bottleneck. I've been to places where guests had to walk down a hall to check in and then walk back out to reach the venue. As an event expert, you look at that and say — this is going to be a problem. Let me give a better example: we did one event where guests had to walk past the bar before reaching check-in.

Lauren: Oh no. People were checking in at the bar.

Jeff: Exactly. 'Hey, while I get us drinks, can you check us all in?' You can never put the bar before check-in. The intentions are good — they want guests to grab a drink on the way in — but they don't think about the behavior that creates. You're incentivizing people to skip check-in entirely.

Jeff: Let me ask you this, Lauren: do you have a position on staffing ratios? How many professional staff versus volunteers?

Lauren: It's a tricky one to judge on that initial consulting call, because we don't want to push as many staff as possible — we want to fit the client's budget and actual need. The questions to ask are: do you have tech-savvy volunteers? Are these the same volunteers who did it last year? Are you using the same platform again? Can your people make it flow? If they can, we'll lead them well and work alongside them — I always recommend a buddy system, pairing a volunteer with a staff member. I also advise that the event manager not personally staff a check-in position when there are other staff and volunteers there. The EM should float so they can instantly help if a volunteer raises their hand, rather than being stuck with a guest themselves.

Jeff: And average staff per event for you?

Lauren: Our average is about three to three and a half staff per event. We still see bigger events — two thousand plus attendees — where eight to ten staff is appropriate. But for most events, we're sending one event manager plus a few people to support volunteers.

Jeff: That sounds very reasonable. My advice to our listeners: depending on your event size, have one or two extremely experienced lead staff. Pay for them — they are worth it. We had a client in DC who does about fifteen hundred people every year. First year we brought eight staff. Now we bring two, six or seven years later, because they've figured out their volunteers and they really just need one strong person at check-in and one in the auction area. Once you get through fifteen hundred people at check-in, everything runs smoothly from there.

Jeff: There's also a pendulum effect we see over time. In the beginning: 'I want all this staff.' Then: 'It costs too much, let me scale back.' Then, eventually: 'I've done so much pre-event work, I just want to enjoy the night — bring everyone back.' I'm actually at that stage with our own event now.

Lauren: Sounds like your event!

Jeff: It is. We're at the point where we want our most experienced Handbid people focused on donor relations and the VIP area, not checking in guests. Stay in your lane. Years ago you needed eight or ten staff because the software was more complicated. Software has really improved and people's adoption of technology has improved. That said, what hasn't changed is the value of a check-in process where you collect email, phone number, credit card, and an accurate paddle number.

Lauren: And people still ask why you need all that information. We had someone just this weekend hand over her home phone number. I had to tell her, 'Honey, I can't send you a text to that number.'

Jeff: Ha — we still see it occasionally. People who left their phone in the car. Someone who gave their credit card to a guest to go charge for a live auction item. Every so often you get surprising situations. But the key is that your trained staff have heard all of these questions before and know exactly how to answer them — from 'Why do you need my credit card?' to handling pushback gracefully. That's the value of trained third-party staff versus untrained volunteers.

Jeff: We had a volunteer at one event who got uncomfortable asking for email addresses because guests seemed annoyed — so she started handing out paddle numbers without collecting any information. When paddle number five hundred raised their hand to bid, we had no idea who they were.

Lauren: And they're there out of the goodness of their heart. They didn't know they were potentially costing the charity thousands of dollars. That lack of understanding — it's actually really sad. If she'd known, she never would have done that.

Jeff: Exactly. So if you feel like your volunteers are going to struggle holding the line on the data collection — name, email, phone, credit card, accurate paddle number — then trained third-party staff is the way to go. That doesn't give them a license to be rude. It just means they understand why that information matters, and they have the confidence and backbone to make sure they get it. All right, Lauren, it's been a pleasure chatting with you about event staffing. Thank you for what you bring to the industry — having seven hundred fifty qualified, trained staff around the country that our clients can rely on is genuinely valuable.

Lauren: Thank you for having me. We've built a great team together on the Handbid side, and we get great feedback on the software. The more intuitive it is, the more the staff appreciate it because they have so much else to handle on-site.

Jeff: Absolutely — and that's always a work in progress. The best event isn't just the software; it's the people helping you operate it. Staffing is an investment, and if you're thinking about how to take your paddle raise from fifty thousand to a hundred or a hundred fifty thousand, quality staffing is part of that equation. Until we meet again — happy fundraising.