Recently, I have been highlighting some of the outstanding community events that happen in our region each summer. Last week, I highlighted several big August happenings, including the Topsham Fair, Brunswick Outdoor Arts Festival, Maine Highland Games and Kindness Day Bath, just to name a few. Additionally, we had two hugely successful events just happen in our region, too, with the first annual Claws N’ Country and the 57th Annual Yarmouth Clam Festival.

As I write this in the Yarmouth office, I’m surrounded by crates that need to go to storage and reports that need to be analyzed, and I’m prepping my thoughts for the recap meeting this afternoon. It got me thinking about how we promote the need for volunteers.

I find that when I write columns about volunteering and engaging, I’m always focusing on day-of activities. However, there are a whole other set of volunteer responsibilities that we rarely mention, having to do with the planning of events and the wrap-up afterward. As I watch a retired school teacher inventorying T-shirts and filling a bin with them for next year, I’m reminded that there are some people who may be able to give two to three hours per week helping with these necessary and not-that-strenuous activities that come along with community events.

Thus, this week I want to focus on the planning of major events to give potential volunteers a glimpse of what that looks like. To do so, we will use an event near and dear to my heart, which is the next edition of the Midcoast Tree Festival that we are again co-hosting in November with All Saints Parish and Spectrum Generations.

For those who are fans of the Facebook page, you should have seen the call for volunteers go out on July 25 (aka Christmas in July) with a photo of Santa in a convertible on the beach. This was the first public announcement of anything involving the 2024 MTF, but we have been meeting for weeks already.

If you’ve never been on a major event planning committee, the first meeting (assuming it’s not a year-round event) is revisiting the points covered in your recap meeting that finalized the previous year’s event. One of the key processes for any event is to have a final recap meeting, which is an honest accounting of what was done well and where there is room for improvement. Both the good and bad are equally essential for what you will plan in the year ahead, and many of the suggestions for improvement either highlight a timeline change needed or bluntly say “suggestions needed.” A great example of a timeline change from last year was needing to get out our volunteer signups much, much earlier, and thus, you see that with our initial announcement of the event being a call for volunteers, five months before the event.

Time is our most precious resource, so often, the solution to a lot of event improvements is to re-order the timeline of the planning. Another piece though is re-prioritizing your project list as the event evolves. We have noticed this with our tree spaces, and getting new tree spaces is a much lower priority this year. In year’s past, getting tree spaces has been our absolute first, second and third priority — without it, we don’t have an event. However, we have somewhere around a 90% return rate of tree spaces every year, meaning nearly everyone that has a tree space one year comes back again the following year. We had 50 tree spaces last year, and we only have room for about five additional trees, which we think we will get easily, thus our first message is volunteers.

The next things that take priority are any new pieces to the event, like this year, we are looking to add some new entertainment, change the opening night event and add a larger auction component. All of these changes will need to be put into the workplan and someone will need to take the lead on these pieces. Now, we’re not ready to get into specifics yet, but if you are someone who has an idea of entertainment that you’d like to see or know of items that people may like to bid on for an auction (or you want to recruit some auction items), those are all great ways you can help that don’t involve day-of engagement.

Now, the most important piece to helping in the run-up to the event is communicating with the planning committee. This is a polite way to say, “Please don’t go out today and start recruiting auction items or entertainment acts without discussing it with our MTF planning committee that meets bi-weekly from now until the event.” There are numerous reasons for this, but mostly, there may be businesses you want to recruit from that we have already asked or entertainers we are already in discussions with or so on. The best way to offer help is to email me at cory@midcoastmaine.com, and I will connect with you and discuss your ideas for helping.

Beyond this, though, there are dozens of other roles that we never publicize, but we could always use help with. These roles include: emptying the storage unit on the Wednesday and Thursday before the event, decorating the space, and setting up trees. Giving us tree space ideas is a huge help — we want to know the items people would want to win. Distributing road signs around the area is also a huge help.

There is so much you can do to help and engage, and along the way, you will make some new friends, too. And this is only one event I’m describing. Many of your favorite events, run by your favorite nonprofits, have all of these simple but necessary tasks that you can help with. I hope this gets you thinking about how you can help with some of your favorite local events.

Cory King is executive director of the Bath-Brunswick Regional Chamber of Commerce.