The Homeless World Cup is a world-class, annual international football tournament, uniting teams of people who are homeless and excluded from society to take a once in a lifetime opportunity to represent their country and change their lives forever.
From 1-7 December 2008, Federation Square and Birrarung Marr came alive with the grit, spirit and glory of the Melbourne 2008 Homeless World Cup, proudly hosted by The Big Issue Australia. Over 500 players from over 50 nations came together with one goal - to end homelessness and change lives.
Now in its sixth year, the Homeless World Cup has triggered and supported grass-roots football projects in over 60 nations working with 30,000 players who are homeless and excluded. Over 70 percent of players significantly change their lives for the better.
Many, many months of planning go into organising and producing an event of this magnitude. The Street Soccer Program is a community initiative of The Big Issue Australia which made it the perfect choice to organise the 2008 event. The Street Soccer Program provides permanent pitches, equipment and coaches at locations across Australia enabling homeless men and women of all playing abilities to train and play matches.
An event of this magnitude requires scores of volunteers to ensure it is run smoothly. Everyone needed to be in the right place, at the right time, doing the right things. “Unlike an ongoing business such as a contact centre, our event was a complex and intense, week-long event with many many stakeholders. Therefore, we needed to get everything right immediately,” explained Natalie Susman, Marketing and Communications Manager of The Big Issue and The Melbourne 2008 Homeless World Cup. “We didn’t have the luxury of experimenting for several weeks to ensure we had everything correct. We needed a solution that could be quickly tailored to our unique requirements and provide accurate rosters right away without a lengthy deployment project.”
With over 800 volunteers performing jobs including hospitality, player support, match officiating, event coordination, spectator services and logistics, The Big Issue had a big task to find a robust and flexible solution that could be very rapidly deployed. They needed a system that would allow effective and simple communication of rosters to all volunteers GMT Customer Case Study Homeless World Cup 2008 ™ DDThe majority of volunteers reported for duty at the right time and place DDSatisfied budgetary and operational objectives DDRosters were generated within two weeks of system implementation and to ensure that the rosters were clear, correct and easily accessible so that volunteers attended their shifts as and when required.
In addition, they also had a goal to limit the overall number of volunteers used during the event as much as possible in order to hold the line on resources such as uniforms, training and other related expenses. So it was imperative that the solution chosen would be one that would grant more shifts to those volunteers with high availability and fewer shifts to those with very low availability, who would only be used if required.
As a not-for-profit organisation, they also had a relatively small budget to contend with. “We knew it was a big task,” said Ms. Susman. “We sought partners who had experience with hospitality and large-scale events like ours, who could provide a robust, fullyfeatured solution, and yet meet our budgetary objectives. We knew that GMT provided its solutions to similar events with outstanding results so that’s where we turned.”
The Homeless World Cup organisers performed a thorough assessment of the leading event rostering tools, including RosterNet and GMT. The heart of the evaluation called for a solution that could be rapidly and effectively deployed; provide flexible rostering to meet a dynamic and rapidly changing environment of the weeklong tournament; could effectively communicate rosters to hundreds of volunteer staff; and could do so without a premium price. As a steward of the community itself, GMT realised the importance of putting its best foot forward and ensuring the event’s success. GMT representatives worked diligently to understand not only The Big Issue’s tactical and budgetary requirements, but also their goals for a successful event.
GMT was also able to parlay its experience with similar events. Organisers of the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, Utah and the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne selected GMT Planet® for staff rostering at those events. Clearly, GMT knew what it took to make an event of this magnitude a success.
“GMT offered a solution that satisfied our technical and operational objectives, but what tipped the scales in GMT’s favour was their experience with large-scale events like the Homeless World Cup. They were also able to provide a solution that was operational within two weeks of installation and to do so within our budgetary constraints. Since the Homeless World Cup is a one week event, held on a world stage, first impressions were exceedingly important to us. We couldn’t afford any slip-ups. GMT impressed us from the first and continued to impress throughout the project ” Ms Susman explains.
Indeed, the deployment lived up to the promise. Through the use of GMT’s web-based employee portal, the Employee Time Centre (ETC), volunteers were able to easily submit their availability to work and view their schedules from any browser. During the event, the majority of volunteers attended their rostered shifts on time and at the correct location. Added Ms Susman, “People don’t often realise the logistics that go into organising an event such as the Homeless World Cup. GMT does and, as a result, rostering for the event was a huge success and left us with one less thing to worry about.”
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