Managing venues' volunteers on a yearly basis: how Qoezion supports Le Temps Machine and Le Bateau Ivre.

2 performing arts venues in Tours (France) keep their music scenes alive thanks to their volunteers:

Le Temps Machine

Le Temps Machine is a venue dedicated to contemporary music. The facility includes two performance halls (with a capacity of 600 and 200 spectators), 3 rehearsal studios and a resource centre.

Le Temps Machine hosts large technical stages and headline artists from different backgrounds: rock, pop, electro, hip hop, reggae…It is also a space for creation and stage support for groups. From time to time, it can also host other projects (exhibitions, conferences, fairs, etc.).

Le Bateau Ivre

Created in 1983 by two music and theatre enthusiasts, Le Bateau Ivre has been from the start a totally atypical cultural venue. After its closure in 2010, a group of citizens was formed to bring new life to this legendary venue. Their project: a performance hall for 299 spectators, accessible to all associations and artist groups, open to all arts.

The organization of Le Bateau Ivre has taken the form of a SCIC ( a cooperative society of collective interest), a status that is part of the solidarity economy, an economic system that places people, and not capital, at the heart of the project.

The same volunteer profiles for both entities:

• many "long-term" volunteers who regularly take part in activities,
• new volunteers who participate once in a while or more often,
• the age of the volunteers varies widely; they can be very young or much older.

An easy-to-use tool for volunteers and organizers.

On Qoezion, teammates have a personal space where they can consult their schedule and messages. Once they get familiar with the tool, teammates appreciate its ease of use.

"Qoezion has been well received by our volunteers," says Thomas Giovani, in charge of Le Bateau Ivre.
"Volunteers create affinities. With Qoezion, they are happy to know who the members of their team are", says Maxime Levieux, in charge of Temps Machine.

Maxime adds: "I tried other tools but I will stay with Qoezion, it is the simplest solution for volunteers and organizers. The platform is easy to manage, the features are relevant, and the support team is very responsive. It's a good system."

A tool that evolves and adapts to all situations.

Thomas explains: "Volunteer management was the first issue I had to deal with, I had one month to create everything in September 2020. When I started using Qoezion, I had some difficulties to apply it to my structure as we needed to manage volunteers for the whole year, not only for a weekend. But once the solution was in place, everything worked perfectly!
Qoezion is the simplest tool I have tried, and the easiest to implement once we have configured everything for our venue."

Saving time on planning in favour of human contact.

Maxime declares: "Saving time on planning allows us to spend more time interacting with our volunteers. We can take the time to call them, it's more comfortable!"

"Volunteers give their free time, volunteering must remain a nice and cool moment, where teams can become real groups of friends. Human contact is essential for our volunteers; an efficient management tool frees up our time to ensure this."

Next steps in your use of Qoezion:

Maxime: "I am actually considering to offer training sessions to volunteers (safety training in particular), but other themes are also relevant, like the development of a module to allow volunteers to submit their ideas or their needs."

Thomas: "We would like to promote citizen democracy, for example through different commissions. We also need to set up volunteer contracts for each individual intervention; a dedicated module for exchanging and archiving documents could be useful."