Universal Success: Illuminating Nonprofit Pathways
ft. Life Event Staffing

Ben: 
Thank you, Lauren, so much for joining me for this I’m Ben O’Shea, COO of Mission Control, this is Lauren Batterby, and I’ll let you introduce yourself.

Lauren:
Thank you, thank you Ben. Thank you so much for having me. I’m so pleased to be here and to support the start of your journey as well. It’s very exciting, the launch of Mission Control, and I’m very pleased to be a part of it with Life Event Staffing. Just to tell a little bit more about us, we are a niche staffing agency that work pretty much 99 % with our nonprofit, industry delivering nationwide experienced auction and technology staff to our large non -profit fundraisers, gala’s, annual events that they are having throughout their year. We are going into our fourth year now, have experienced incredible growth over the last few years. I’m pleased to say that it’s overwhelming that the need for this service within our industry. And I’m so pleased that we are able to offer what we offer to be able to fill that need. So a little bit more about the service is we are purely an on-site service for event managers and additional event support staff. So you will have one-on-one interaction with your event manager from a pre-event call to make sure we know all the ins and outs of the event and the logistics before we arrive on site, and then also from start to finish on the day. Auction and tech assistance, as well as customer service from point of volunteer training throughout your check-in, throughout the live auction and live appeal, and then again to check out. We also deliver a lot of best practices with our service as well to give additional support to our nonprofits. Again, how to make that streamlined successful fundraiser.

Ben:
Fantastic! I really appreciate that. And we’re really excited to have Life Event Staffing on Mission Control. And appreciate you guys partnering with us here early on in our existence. We’re excited to build this community together. would you mind kind of telling us a little bit about how you got into event staffing, how you found your way into the field? I know personally that you’ve done this for many years now, but I’m sure the audience would love to hear that story as well.

Lauren: 
Yeah, no problem. I can take you right back to the start. So obviously I am not from the US originally. I am from Manchester, England and I started working at Givesmart UK back in 2013, I think it was. I was headhunted by a recruiter who was looking for an event manager and I said, no, I’m afraid I can’t take an interview with them because it says in the description, tech savvy. And I don’t think I am. And I don’t think that’s something that I would be appropriate for. Anyway, they rang me and they said, can you use an iPhone? Can you use an iPad? I was like, well, yeah, absolutely. They were like, come in and talk to us and let’s tell you more about what we were able to offer. And they were the very start of the silent auction technology in the UK. So I worked a lot of the London events, a lot of Manchester events, across the entirety of the UK, in and out of the car, on the road, venturing out to all these events to assist with whatever we could whilst we were on site. We were actually offering auction items at the same time and taking a team with us and here we are and let’s raise money together. Then, GiveSmart actually sold out to another company called Givergy in the UK and I was asked by GiveSmart US to come out and head up the operations out of their Atlanta office and obviously I jumped at the opportunity and that was back in 2017. So I was working with a team of about 300 staff with the training that they were doing, the staffing them on the events across the whole of the US and then also the equipment logistics as well. And next chapter is Give Smart was purchased by Community Brands. And we were united with Gesture and 501. I managed to keep the same rule, but in a regional position doing a very similar thing. So again, working with our teams, making sure they were trained and ready, readily prepared for anything they needed to be when they were on site as event managers and also equipment. So unfortunately then the pandemic hit and the first people to go were all our lovely staff these events just weren’t happening. No one was in person anymore and everything became remote. And no one knew where the life of events was actually I was actually working with more remote events at this point with a different technology platform. And I was approached by… Givergy from when I was back in the UK and they said, we know what you do and we know who you know and we are really struggling with staff at the moment because we’re using agencies that have perfectly capable brand ambassadors but they don’t know fundraising. They do not have on -site auction experience. So basically, can you help us out? I said, hey, here’s an idea. Why don’t you outsource it to me? I will look after these staff. I will be the advocate for them all. I will look after And if you can provide me with the training of your technology, I will make sure they deliver with their expertise. And that’s how we took off. So that was back in 2021. And I had a pool of about 40 staff and we ran a full season of Givergy events. Just so happened that other technology platforms seemed to hear about what we were doing. I knew quite a few people that were interested in this type of a service and we just built more and more platforms, became involved. We provide us with the training and we deliver the staff. And now again, we’re going into our fourth year, feeling hugely enthusiastic about what more is to also come. And we have now, I think on the last count, looking at about 650 staff nationwide and Canada across about 10 platforms. And we’re adding more and more partners every day. We want to position ourselves as somewhere that any non -profit will be able to come for advice. What is the technology that’s available out there? What are the key components of fundraising for your event that you are looking for? And we can advise appropriately, we can refer them to the correct technology, then whilst also being able to provide their staff on site and a lot of the best practices that can really help with their events too. We do have a full training academy that we are about to launch to our nonprofits who feel like they need a little bit more grounding when it comes to how to run events on site. So I’m not talking about the fundamentals of building the event together. I’m talking about those wonderful volunteers that give their time for free to be able to come and assist with that event and how we can prepare them that’s the exciting part of what’s going to happen in 2014.

Ben:
Very exciting. I mean, it’s always fun to hear. I mean, one, you know, we have a similar path. I was on the Gesture side and we came together on community brands, give smart world. of course, you were running the east, I was running the west and COVID hit and that’s where we kind of parted ways. But, it’s always super exciting to see like former co workers, friends trying new things doing new things and and seeing it scale and grow so quickly you know it’s 40 people to 650 people in in four years three years you know.

Lauren: 
It sounds a little unbelievable, doesn’t it? I don’t believe it myself sometimes, but yeah. You’d be surprised how many kind people are out there that also want to help our non -profits and just love the fact that we do this. Because like I said, every event is this non -profit fundraising gala. We’re not a staffing agency that’s doing car shows or selling shots around a Vegas pool and not that there’s anything against that type of work. It’s just not the industry that we’re working in. So we have a lot of our staff that truly do want to work within this industry.

Ben: 
Yeah, I always found that it was one of the most rewarding areas to be working in, which is why I’m back here again. working with nonprofits, you go to these events and you see the good that these organizations can do. just being a little part of it is super rewarding, at least for me personally. And I know a lot of having been an event staffer and come up through the ranks and running hundreds of events you feel really good about the work that you do. And it’s great that you guys have trained your staff to be dedicated to what a nonprofit needs And they might also have models that are doing things somewhere else at the event. But you guys are there specifically to help out with the auction and platforms and software and all that kind of fun stuff that goes into that. So your expertise is certainly, like you said, a little niche, but highly needed. So we’re really, excited to have you on the platform there’s a lot of event staffing agencies out there. And I know that you’ve worked with multiple ones in the past and experienced
the goods and the bads of all that. After COVID, like you said, you’re probably one of the first that really came back into this event space with the nonprofit side of things. what’s been a, challenge coming out of trying to reestablish this space?

Lauren:
That is a very good question. I think that my first thought on that is that it wasn’t actually that difficult because people were so keen to get back out there. So, so keen to get back out and have the help that they needed. They’d run hybrid events, they’d run remote events throughout the pandemic that we can’t deny had been successful. I think there was a huge amount of success from the remote events out there. We all know the key benefits of still doing that. You know, so we’re not trying to take away from, from any of those platforms that are perfectly capable of running those types of events. We still do a lot of hybrid, but I think what it comes down to, people couldn’t wait to get back out there and be not just the nonprofits themselves, the guests wanted to get back out there. They enjoy the experience of the event and our nonprofits appreciate our help. You know, to have someone there to be able to almost hand off a certain amount of tasks to, okay, we trust you, you’ve got the option covered, we are in safe hands, fantastic. So then you as the nonprofit are able to go out and be the face of your organization and making sure that those high -worth donors are met at the door and treated the way they should be on the way in. So it gives them something less to be concerned about throughout the evening and just watch the dollars roll in. So was it difficult? No, because I think there was such a need for it. It wasn’t too difficult to sell. The hardest part is building up the trust. We were a new company out there. And the way I was able to combat that was going directly to our software partners, right? Because if I built the trust with these guys, then they would promote us further. So we have fantastic relationships with our partners and it’s not just a case of, oh sure, yeah, we can run any event. No, each technology is different. We have contractual partnerships set up with all of them to make sure we not only get all the training, but it’s completely up to date. They have to keep us up to date with any new releases that they have. And also we get direct support on the night from that platform. So if anything does go wrong, if we do have any tech issues or questions, we have that direct line of support and we don’t send the staff out unless we have that all set up for them in hand. So again, building that trust worthy partnership to then be able to move forward together to refer to each other. I think that’s definitely what solidified it for us.

Ben:
Cool. Awesome. So I don’t know, maybe like a little tag on to that question, in your experience, what’s comes out of these types of events that you find really rewarding

Lauren:
It’s really all components because there is a general structure for each event. if you can bring it down to its most basic format and keep it as simple as that is what I want to try to do when we work with our nonprofits at the very, very beginning That is a successful event. I always ask my staff this quite often as well because the word from the floor is always the what’s golden really to us because they are the ones that are dealing with it. I said, what would be your first piece of advice to one of our nonprofit clients about their check -in? And one I’d not heard before was make sure you have enough people checking in, not only for queue management, but to build a rapport with your guests as they arrive. I thought, my goodness, that’s key customer service. And I wasn’t really thinking about that side of it. I was just thinking, we keep them moving, you know, efficient check -in, efficient technology, let’s get them in, make sure they have everything that they need. But no, it’s not about that. It’s about being welcoming at the same time. And the underlying answer to that is have enough people at your check -in desk in order for them not to feel pressured and rushed. Again, we have support staff. We also have those volunteers. If we can prepare those volunteers, they are the heart and soul of the organization. They’re there because they want to be, not because they’re being paid to be. So let’s use them for their kindness. You know, let that show as guests are We’re not in competition against the volunteers. We want to work together.

Ben:
Absolutely.

Lauren:
They’re the ones that can answer a lot of the questions because they’ve been supporting the organization for such a long time. So maybe I have highlighted that I do have an overall and it really is having the on -site staff from nonprofit and the volunteers prepared in order to be able to run a smooth event. That’s the challenge. and they’re gonna be the ones that are there.

Ben:
That’s great advice, you know, I think it’s One that the volunteers are there the day of but they’re also gonna be the ones that are there After you guys are gone, right? So having them there at check -in and and having them build that rapport. It’s building a Year -round relationship with these donors. It’s not just oh, hey, you know here life event staffing We’re gonna check you in and have a good day You know, it’s much more than that. So, you know, it’s really helping these these nonprofits 
build a rapport with their donors and keeping them coming back throughout the year. I’m sure that we both experience this where somebody walks through the door and somebody’s running up and getting them a hug, right? They’ve known them for years. They’re just super excited to be there, super excited to see each other. But it starts somewhere. They didn’t always just know each other that well. So, could you share your favorite event that you have done with life event staffing or one that’s most memorable to you.

Lauren: 
At the start of this event, basically they were raising money for a wellness, wellness house, wellness, it wasn’t quite a retreat, I think that’s a bit of a grand word for it, but basically if you were a family that had lost a child or experienced loss somewhere where you could go to mourn, to be together, to have that time together away from reality, just to deal with loss which I thought was a wonderful cause and a wonderful idea. Now on every table there was a donor card. I don’t necessarily see the connection here and that’s also can be quite a tricky one because not everybody wants to push donors anyway, however, Becky Speaker. So this goes into the storytelling of it as well was the mother of the child who had passed away through choking on a toy. It’s an incredibly sad story. He was only two years old and they were donors and they did donate his organs and saved six other children. Now I’d never heard a story like that before because again, donating organs for a child, it’s a really tricky situation. I think it was handled with grace on the day as well and it really sparked something within me and I know a couple within our team to the point where the staff sort of asked more about it, how can we help promote this? So we were taken away from the tech side of it because we felt like this was such a huge part of the event and all the staff signed up, then they were trying to promote, as many people signed up on the night for general donors, not for your children, this is general organ donors and I feel like it really affected the staff and I think because their heart was then in it they became a part of the team because we knew what was going on and their team were extremely helpful in leading the staff to then to be able to promote this cause. 

Ben:
Yeah, that’s a great one.

Lauren: 
that. I’m not sure whether organ donation is too much of a gray area. It’s almost like talking about politics.

Ben:
I’m a donor myself, so I’m on board.

Lauren:
Well Me too! I love that story but it’s also then different as a parent. Could I still do that if I was in that situation? I’m not sure. I would like to hope that I can’t to know your child saved.

Ben:
Right, now you know, I know, we all know that the event industry is constantly evolving, obviously went through a great change during Covid and has kind of come back around a little bit more towards the way it used to be. But now we have hybrid events, we have virtual events, we have in -person how does life event staffing stay really stay ahead of the curve?

Lauren:
Yeah, I think with our service level offering, I have really tried to open to our entire market, which is difficult as a provider. You can’t really keep everyone happy. I always say, you know, keep it simple. We stick to our own skillset. We stay in our lane. But what I have thought, we can break down our industry into different needs. Okay, so are you a non -profit that’s earning over a million? You need the fancy technology that’s got all the bells and whistles and you need a large staff because you’ve got a thousand plus guest event. Fantastic. we can do that for you. are you a smaller event, maybe where you’ve only got 500 guests, under 500 guests, you just really need that event manager to be there to assist on the who can lead your team of volunteers. We can absolutely assist with that as well. Maybe our volunteer training with our online resources would also be helpful to you. We also offer a remote service. So again, these are coming down in different price tiers at the same time, but not actually taking away from the service that is and then again, the lowest level would be this training that we are offering. If you are a small school or church, local church, and you have a lot of local people, there again, are these wonderful people that just want to help out but they end up a bit of a deer in headlights registration point because they just don’t know because they were unprepared. With our simple training that we can then offer to you, you do not need to have any of our staff on site, but we really still feel like we can set you up for the level of success that you need with offering our best practices and guidance on the day. So to have been able to widen our service level, I really hope now we can cover all options for different sizes of events and different levels of fundraising.

Ben:
Very cool. When do you think a nonprofit should consider engaging with a staffing agency of some sort? And part two to that question, should a nonprofit be asking themselves or looking for when they are considering particular agencies or staffing groups? What do you think a non -profit should really ask themselves as they’re going through this decision process?

Lauren: 
As early as possible because that is where we can help and offer guidance. You know, it often seems to be that staff are the last thing that are thought of and it’s booked within a panic four weeks prior to the event, but we thought we could handle it and we couldn’t. Well, why not speak to us at the very start, take up a consulting call with us. Again, we are having unbiased opinion across multiple different platforms we can assist whether you even need technology or not. Before you go and spend crazy amounts, ask us and we will let you know and we can make these referrals and introductions. Same with working with your auctioneer. Don’t leave them till last minute. They can also help with guidance of how fundraising should be on the evening from their aspect as well. We know and have great relationships with a lot of auctioneers. Maybe we could refer someone, we’ve worked with auctioneers referrals all the time as well. So we work in a good partnership. So if we were able to refer you your technology, provide you with your staff, refer an auctioneer, you may also want an event planner that we also deal with and work quite, quite closely with. So although we’re all individual companies, we do all want to work together to achieve the same goal. So as early as you can bring all these people together, the less stress that you will have the closer to your event where you can work on your sponsorships and your storytelling and the entertainment for your event and all these other also important features that come into it. But if you can pull your fundraising team together early on, that would be a huge weight lifted. And I promise you, we work together We all know each other and we all enjoy working together and we want to help.

Ben: 
As I’m sitting down as a nonprofit and I’m weighing life event staffing against somebody else What do you think is important in differentiating which person I go with?

Lauren: 
I think firstly as, and let’s go on the legal terms of things here, at the end of the day we could be dealing with an awful lot of money. You need to make sure you have got legally reliable support staff with you on site so if the worst may happen that you know you are 100 % covered. We offer full W2 employment to the states where we where we have to to be able to comply to these rules across the US and Canada and are fully insured for any liabilities that might happen when on site. And if that was me coming as a non -profit with my large event, I would want to make sure that we had all areas covered. I said legalities and insurance and that is something that we do promote ourselves and able to offer. Now, the kinder side of things, it all comes down to the missions and values of the company. At the end of the day, we all want to help. And I think from that first sales call or social media interaction or from a website that it should come across how you want to work. Are you a very corporate establishment or are you a much more organically built company? We offer, we offset all our CO2 emissions. So I do like to pride us on being a very green company at the same time. And before I launch any of these things, I do always consult with our staff, we want to know what organizations they are wanting to support and how we can support them with their personal obligations to different non -profits. So, again, I’m very proud to say that we have built this team organically. It’s all been through friendly referral. We do have a very accurate, precise onboarding process to be a part of our team. And if you don’t support our morals, you can’t work with us internally. So then working with our clients, if we’re able to promote this, we hope that we can then align with you and your ways of working. So we do know we have the best people on site to work with you also.

Ben: 
Cool, yeah, that’s fantastic. there’s different staffing groups out there and it’s always nice to know some of the differences that you might find when you’re comparing different.
So obviously, Life Event Staffing has been an early adopter of Mission Control and what we’re trying to do and the community we’re trying to build and bring nonprofits with their providers. How do you see like a platform like Mission Control facilitating these types of connections and one providing value to you as a service provider, but also to the nonprofits who are looking for services?

Lauren: 
I think is going to be a hugely valuable resource to vendors as well as nonprofits. Off the back of the question that you just asked me about how you sell yourself, it’s difficult and friendly referrals within the industry has what’s definitely got us to where we are, building these relationships. So the fact that you can put a review on each other’s profile
is huge to us. I love that, that vendors can rate each other as well as non -profits for being able to rate because I have got plenty of people out there that I would love to rave about and would like to hope that I have a few supporters out there as well. So I think that’s hugely valuable for our non -profits to be able to see that if you are established within the industry and trusted supplier by other suppliers that I think that will really do us all extremely well and again establishes that level of trust.

Ben: 
I appreciate that. You know, we’re just trying to build a hub and a location for nonprofits to come.

Lauren: 
I see Mission Control as a huge resource to our nonprofits out there because it’s just housing everything in one place. How fantastic just to be easy enough to search within that search bar section of something that you are looking for and see this huge list of trusted providers. How simple to be able to get where you are going. Again, I think I’ve used the word simple several times throughout this but I think that’s what people need. It’s a fast -paced world. So knowing you’ve got that one place to go to be able to find what you need and it be a trusted supplier and you can read the reviews and you can see what services that they are able to offer all in one place is fantastic.

Ben:
Awesome! Cool. Well, one last question here, I know we’ve only got a couple minutes to go, we’re super excited to have Life Event Staffing partner with Mission Control, But looking forward to the future, what is like some of your future aspirations and goals for Life Event Staffing?

Lauren: 
Okay, so I did mention briefly earlier about the launch of our volunteer academy. In quotes, because we’re still trying to come up with the appropriate name and we’ve been going backwards and forwards internally for a while. Wanted to elaborate more on volunteer training because this is not just the 10 minutes we train people on how to run software on site. This really is the fundamentals of preparation for a fundraising event. So I am extremely excited for that, Well, it was launched at the end of last year, but the push is really coming in this year. All the content is created and ready to go because I really do feel like this is the final piece of the puzzle of our service offerings. And now we can reach every market. Every organization out there can feel like they have assistance from Life Events staffing across any of their events. And I think that’s a personal goal and achievement that I feel quite proud of. I did when we first started, when I first started Life Event Staffing and I said, we are just event managers and event support. I’m one person, I can’t give any more. This is what the staff are trained to do and we are sticking with what we know. But again, turning people away because of budgets really hard on the heart when you’re trying to work with non -profits but when we felt like there was nothing else we were able to offer even if a huge discount on our services and obviously we’re still a business we can’t offer this it had to be something new so I really had to put my thinking cap on to come up with what it was that we did well what we do well is train our staff so why not share that knowledge with other people out there that may not necessarily be able to afford our staff on It really is a huge privilege to be able to have that extra support and we understand that. There are also a lot of different technology platforms out there that are ranging from free to thousands and thousands of dollars. So if the technology market is able to cater from one extreme to the other. I’m out to conquer and I think this year we really will have widened our market and if anybody out there has any additional ideas of what they would like us to import please do not hesitate to to get in touch. The world is our oyster and I still roll with this enthusiasm. 

Ben:
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Lauren.

Lauren: 
Love it. Thank you.