Key takeaways
- Despite working with numerous agencies and platforms, Life Surge had difficulties finding enough reliable, skilled professionals for the large-scale, faith-based events they hold across the country.
- Once Life Surge switched to Instawork for staffing, their fill rate averaged nearly 100% and quality of staff improved significantly.
- Not only has Life Surge saved time and money, but they are now confident enough to expand the size of their events, knowing they will be able to source as many as 350 staff members per event through Instawork.
When your business is built around day-long events across the country that attract thousands of attendees, you need staff to provide an excellent attendee experience —and lots of them.
Life Surge, which holds faith-based events that bring together Christian speakers, entrepreneurs, and worship teams, is a case in point. With events held in major cities nationwide, they need staff to set up and take down equipment, check in attendees, sell merchandise, and serve food to as many as 4,000 people at a time.
Challenge: Finding hundreds of workers for one-day events nationwide
“Staffing was one of our biggest headaches,” admitted Christie Fitzgerald, Life Surge’s Director of Events. The event producer would spend hours, if not days, calling on as many as a half-dozen staffing agencies, platforms, and assistants to find enough workers—an average of nearly 150—for each event. Even then, staff would fail to show up, go missing, or even fall asleep on the job.
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Solution: Turning to Instawork to find reliable workers across different locations and cities
After reading customer reviews of Instawork, Fitzgerald reached out to the company for a July 2022 event. Life Surge also used workers from several other agencies for that event, but “the crew that came with Instawork was far superior to any other we’ve ever seen,”
“Having reliable people who actually enjoy being there, who are trained, who know what's going on, is huge for us.”
Life Surge now relies exclusively on Instawork for event professionals. The quality of the staff is a key reason, of course, but it’s not the only one. Another is the ability to communicate with Instawork's Professionals prior to the event.
“Before, if we had 150 people show up, it was all from different agencies and there was no way to communicate,” Fitzgerald explained. With Instawork "you can send out an announcement to everybody and send training materials ahead of time.”
Fitzgerald also appreciates how easy the Instawork platform is to use:
“It’s so user-friendly. You can enter what you need and make adjustments as you go.” For instance, if an event proves more popular than anticipated, she can simply request more pros.
Results: Saving time, saving money, and preparing for expansion
Since using Instawork exclusively, Life Surge has had a staff fill rate for its events of nearly 100%.
“It’s definitely saved us time. It saved us money,” Fitzgerald said. “Across the board, it's been a game changer, from the planning to the customer experience to even running the merch tables.”
Fitzgerald has been so impressed with the results, for a recent event in Denver she used Instawork Professionals not only for general labor and event setup and takedown, but also for data entry.
“But I think the best thing about Instawork is it's kind of reassuring,” Fitzgerald said. “In 2023 our events are doubling in size, so we're going to double our needs for temp staff, up to 300-350 people [per event]. And we feel confident to do that because it's not going to take hours and hours for us to find people to come help us.”
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