Schneider Electric Marathon de Paris

44,000 volunteers, 42 km route: the Schneider Electric Marathon de Paris relies on WeezCrew

Flore Hutchings, Head of the Volunteers Department at ASO – Amaury Sport Organisation, coordinates several thousand volunteers every year to support the 55,000 runners in the Schneider Electric Marathon de Paris. It’s a major logistical challenge, requiring rigorous organisation.

To centralise information, allocate tasks efficiently over a 42 km course and maintain fluid communication between the event’s coordinators and volunteers, the Paris Marathon relies on the WeezCrew solution. The solution facilitates the management of the event by ensuring optimum organisation and reinforcing the commitment of the teams on the ground.

Managing volunteers: the XXL format of the Paris Marathon

For the Schneider Electric Paris Marathon, Amaury Sport Organisation has to manage an exceptional number of volunteers every year: 4,000 in total, including more than 3,000 mobilised on race day alone. The diversity of profiles – individual participants, partner schools and associations – makes organisation even more complex, especially as the majority of exchanges take place via referrers, with no direct contact between the organisation and each volunteer. With WeezCrew, the organisation can centralise exchanges and simplify coordination for smoother, more efficient management.

Customised form fields were automatically added to a centralised database, giving access to dynamic views. In particular, these views made it easier to manage logistical requirements, such as the distribution of T-shirt sizes for volunteers.

Once registrations had been finalised using the WeezCrew form, available on the “Partage ta passion” page – created to bring together volunteers for sports events in Paris – the teams had a structured pool of volunteers. All they had to do was assign each person to a precise mission before the race, accompanied by a mission order detailing the place, time and tasks to be carried out on D-day.

Ensuring the best possible distribution of volunteers on the ground

Marathons are long distances, which means that volunteers have to be deployed at every strategic point along the route. The organisation manages 43 different missions, including 30 on the day of the race, distributing the workforce between the start, the finish and the entire route. Previously, coordinating the 4,000 volunteers at the Paris Marathon involved a succession of tools: Excel files, messaging platforms, badge-issuing software and CRM. This fragmentation slowed down the teams and made monitoring more complex.

WeezCrew makes it possible to plan the distribution of registered volunteers in advance, by displaying their assignments directly on the platform. Requirements are defined for each zone, enabling the organising team to adjust volumes and profiles according to local constraints. The result: 400 volunteers positioned at the start, 800 at the finish, and 1,800 spread out along the route.

The WeezCrew dashboard provides a clear overview, with gauges and maximum thresholds defined by zone. Thanks to the list of members, staff can identify at a glance how many volunteers are assigned to each sector – start, course or finish. They can then send the assignment sheets in just a few clicks, by selecting the mission concerned directly. For example, for the ‘medal distribution’ mission in the finish area, a precise number of volunteers had been planned, directly linked to the needs identified. This fluidity means that the organisers can send information and assignment forms to all the volunteers mobilised along the route in just a few minutes.

Thanks to the automated transmission of assignment sheets, each team leader has the information they need to coordinate their group. Instructions are sent directly by e-mail or SMS from the platform, which also centralises responses, without any intermediaries or re-entering of data. The result: smooth implementation from D-day onwards.

Strengthening the commitment and sense of belonging of volunteers

Renewing the volunteer community is a key challenge for the Schneider Electric Marathon de Paris, particularly in view of the ageing of the profiles and the need to maintain a high level of commitment from one event to the next.

Thanks to WeezCrew, the organisation has the tools it needs to tailor its communications to specific missions, groups and partner organisations. In all, 25 campaigns were sent out to the different volunteer segments.

This massive thank-you campaign was an opportunity for the race to gather feedback from runners, in order to create a link between the volunteers and the participants, as Sylvain explains: “Thanks to the great volunteers at the feed stations who didn’t hesitate to encourage us by our first names! It felt really good!”

The mailing also provided an opportunity to send volunteers as many photos as possible of what the organisers warmly refer to as ‘the volunteer team’ – another vector of strong commitment, highlighted by the mailings carried out with WeezCrew. Messages of thanks reinforced the volunteers’ sense of belonging to this major event.