How the Estonian Song Celebration used Zelos to handle last-minute tasks at a 32,000-singer event
How Estonian Song Celebration uses Zelos
The Estonian Song Celebration is one of the largest amateur choir events in the world. The 2019 edition, the XXVII in a tradition dating back to 1869, brought together more than 32,000 performers in front of an audience of 100,000, with many more watching on live television. The total population of Estonia is 1.3 million people.
The event ran on 1,900 staff and just 100 volunteers. The volunteer side was coordinated through Zelos.
Staff posted tasks in Zelos. Volunteers opened the app and claimed the ones they could do. Tasks ranged from days-ahead planning items (printing invitations, moving props) to same-day last-minute fixes (restocking the coffee station, getting fresh flowers, notifying organisers when the staff bus was on its way). The whole task list lived in one place, so volunteers always saw what was needed and could sign up with one tap.
The challenge
The Estonian Song Celebration is the country’s largest cultural event. Pulling together 32,000 performers in front of 100,000 people requires careful planning across thousands of moving parts, and a staff of 1,900 to execute. The volunteer team alongside that staff is much smaller, just 100 people.
That ratio matters. With 100 volunteers covering the work the 1,900 staff cannot get to, every minute of volunteer coordination has to go somewhere useful. A volunteer coordinator cannot afford to spend her day calling around to find someone free to restock the coffee station.
The work also has a built-in unpredictability problem. Some tasks can be planned days ahead: printing and assembling invitations, moving props to the concert venue. Many others come up in the moment: fresh flowers for an unexpected greeting, the staff bus arriving earlier than expected, a coffee station running dry. A volunteer coordinator cannot pre-write a task list for things that have not happened yet.
Spreadsheets, group texts, and email chains do not handle this well. A static task list goes stale within hours. Group texts make it hard to see who has actually claimed a task. Email chains scale linearly with the number of volunteers, which is fine for ten people but unworkable for a hundred at a two-day event.
The solution
In the days leading up to the event, the Song Celebration staff posted tasks in Zelos as a central volunteer management app. Some tasks went to the full volunteer dashboard. Others were targeted to specific groups sorted by skill, experience, or department, so the right people saw the right work.
Once the event started, the same system carried last-minute tasks. Printing and assembling unexpected invitations. Moving extra props to the concert venue. Restocking the team coffee station. Getting fresh flower bouquets. Notifying organisers when the staff bus was on its way to the concert. Every one of these tasks went into Zelos as soon as it came up, and the right volunteer was on it within minutes.
Volunteers used Zelos on mobile and desktop. They saw the available tasks in one place and claimed with one tap. The mobile access kept the system working across the festival grounds and the multi-day event schedule, wherever the volunteer happened to be.
This left the organisers free for the big picture. The small, unpredictable tasks that fill any large event got handled by volunteers self-organising around the task list, without anyone needing to phone around or write a fresh email chain.
The results
A 100-volunteer team coordinated through Zelos handled the unpredictable tasks behind a two-day event with 32,000 performers and 100,000 audience members.
The two days of the 2019 Estonian Song Celebration ran with the volunteer side coordinated through Zelos. Tasks posted in the days leading up to the event covered the planning side. Tasks posted during the event itself handled the unpredictable middle. The 100-volunteer team self-organised around both.
The model is portable to any large event running on a mix of paid staff and a smaller volunteer base. Festival, conference, concert series, sporting event: same workflow. Post tasks centrally. Target by skill where it matters. Let volunteers claim. The organisers stay on the big picture.