L’Échappée Belle

Organising an ultra-trail event such as l’Échappée Belle involves complex management of volunteers, logistics and missions on difficult and extensive terrain. Faced with these challenges, the organisers chose WeezCrew from the outset to optimise coordination and improve volunteer involvement. This solution has enabled the Échappée Belle team to simplify volunteer management, while ensuring an efficient distribution of tasks and smooth coordination throughout the event.

Preparing volunteer logistics before the event

Managing volunteers for a large-scale event like l’Echappée Belle involves complex coordination of logistical information, such as transport, accommodation and missions. This organisation is all the more difficult in such a demanding and extensive terrain, with volunteers spread out over isolated posts. With over 200 km of route, preparing the volunteers to carry out their roles with the participants, while ensuring that everyone has all the necessary information, is a real challenge.

The major advantage of the WeezCrew solution is its ability to concentrate all the essential information on a single platform, giving each volunteer simplified access to precise data at all times, enabling them to act accordingly. In practical terms, for the event’s logistics, this ensures that everyone can consult the details of their assignment in real time, covering all logistical requirements on the day when all attention must be focused on the runners.

Logistical information, such as transport and accommodation, as well as other elements specific to the volunteer’s assignment, are therefore dealt with in advance of the event, thanks in particular to the station managers, volunteers who have also taken charge of WeezCrew via a dedicated space to manage small teams of less experienced volunteers.

By using personalised fields at the time of registration, volunteers were also able to indicate their transport preferences, making it easier to organise car pooling and optimise resource management. This solution enabled the organising team to reduce logistical errors and ensure optimum preparation of volunteers prior to the event. For loyal volunteers, registration is simplified by keeping their profile history on the platform, making re-registration quick and hassle-free.

Managing volunteers in remote locations and coordinating their rotation

Managing volunteers spread out over hard-to-reach areas and setting up rotas is a major challenge for organising an event such as l’Échappée Belle. Volunteers often have to travel long distances, particularly to provide supplies in areas that are often difficult to access. This requires meticulous organisation to ensure the safety and smooth running of the event.

WeezCrew has made it possible to centralise volunteer assignments and rotations on a single platform, ensuring real-time monitoring of missions. Thanks to the automated transmission of mission orders via the platform, each volunteer could find his or her team at what the race organisers call “mountain stations”, places where runners pass through high altitude. The immediacy of the information provided by WeezCrew is essential, as each post can be several hours’ walk away. As the teams of volunteers had to be constantly co-ordinated, it was essential for them to have rapid contact with the race organisers.

Keeping track of mission orders was also an important issue for the volunteers. The teams were made up of a wide variety of people with different backgrounds and experience, so everyone had to be able to enter an assignment on the platform quickly and efficiently, thus optimising the trail’s operations. A high degree of flexibility was required.

Keeping volunteers loyal and committed

Keeping volunteers loyal over the long term, especially those in key refreshment posts, is a major challenge for the Échappée Belle organisers. Mountain posts” are very popular with volunteers, who like to spend nights in contact with the riders.

On the other hand, volunteers are less enthusiastic about less original tasks, such as unloading deliveries. The race organisers were therefore looking to energise and unite the volunteers, whatever their role, and to ensure that everyone felt like a small cog in a great cause, without minimising their contribution.

The organisation needed to optimise the leveraging of the WeezCrew solution, particularly in terms of stimulating its volunteer community. The use of forms and personalised fields enabled it to collect as much information as possible about volunteers, such as their telephone number or e-mail address, making it easier to get in touch. This has enabled us to take stock of the situation with them and show them that they are listened to and valued. Each volunteer present also received a telephone call from a member of the organising team 15 days before the event.

This regular contact was maintained thanks to e-mail campaigns carried out throughout the year to ensure the ongoing commitment of volunteers to the event. In total, 13 email campaigns and targeted communications were carried out via WeezCrew by the organisers, some of which included mountain activities, thus maintaining team cohesion among these 650 volunteers, who are true ambassadors of the event. In addition to these e-mail campaigns, the tool is also used to solicit volunteers for satellite events. This is the case for the Beyond the Trail project, ensuring fluid communication and constant commitment, even outside the main events.