Having volunteered at the Develop: Brighton game developer’s conference since 2023, I stepped up to be the Lead Volunteer for Develop: North in November 2024 and am continuing as Co-Lead for Brighton for the 2025 event and the forseeable future.

During this time, I have helped restructure the volunteer management systems to support the growing number of volunteers needed to accomodate the 5000< visitors to the conference. In 2024, I helped with the transition to a spreadsheet based schedule and used a primitive conditional formatting system to help volunteers indentify what shifts they were registered under, though since then I have created a bespoke system which will save roughly 4-5 hours per volunteer per year based on personal experience of the previous scheduling system. For the 2025 conference, this is expected to save 200 hours of volunteer work across the 3 day event.

The system will also allow for volunteers to have a more equal experience across the event than in previous years, as shifts will be distributed evenly and based on each volunteers preference.

We trialled this new approach for Develop: North in 2024 to great success with very little questions or confusion from any volunteers after the initial training, despite the fact that this was a new venue for Tandem Events, was only a one day event with 400< attendees, was my first time leading a large team, and all other volunteers at this event were entirely new to Develop.

The spreadsheet itself takes input from a Google Form asking each volunteer required information, then passes this information through to the ‘Subscribed’ sheet, from which I can assign volunteers to their 5 preferred session choices. Following this, the data is then transferred to the ‘Schedule’ sheet, where I can evenly assign volunteers to shifts throughout the three days.