Case study · Volunteer management SaaS
Bénévènement is volunteer management software for events: a form where everyone picks their shifts, spots counted live, printable rosters per station and group emails. It is our product, not a client’s: we designed it, we develop it and we run it.
It did not come out of a design workshop. It first served a real festival, with real volunteers, before being opened to others — and that origin explains most of the decisions below.
Visit the live site(benevenement.fr, new window)
At the Phare Ouest’Ival festival, whose website we also built, volunteers were managed the way many non-profits manage them: in a shared spreadsheet. Availability came in by email, by text, by private message, and the up-to-date version only existed in the head of whoever was copying it over.
In spring 2026, we wrote the tool that was missing. It handled sign-ups for the 2026 edition: 83 volunteers and 189 shifts, from set-up to tear-down. Bénévènement takes its core and makes it configurable, so that a race, a trade fair or a village fête can use it without seeing a single word of festival vocabulary.
Remaining spots are shown shift by shift, a full shift closes, and two overlapping shifts cannot be taken by the same person. What a spreadsheet lets through, only to be discovered at the briefing, is refused the moment the volunteer clicks.
Concerts, races or talks are entered with their times: the tool flags a volunteer assigned during the one they wanted to see. That is what brings people back the following year, and it is something a generic tool cannot do. With no line-up, the module switches off.
One roster per station, with its lead and their phone number, ready to print. At the security desk or along a trail course, the network does not always reach: the organisation has to hold without it, and that was designed in from the start rather than left to a spreadsheet export reformatted by hand.
A non-profit votes a budget per event, not a subscription for the ten months when nothing happens. The first edition is free in full, with no card, rather than for fourteen days: a time-limited trial usually ends before volunteer sign-ups have even started.
The application sits behind a login; what can be measured publicly is the marketing site, the page through which an organiser discovers the tool. The figures below were taken there under the conditions of a phone on an average network.
Google considers a site fast below 2.5 s.
Nothing moves while the page loads. The penalty threshold is 0.1.
All to the site itself: no third-party domain called.
The three screenshots of the tool are only loaded on scroll, when you reach them.
Measured on 23 September 2026 on the benevenement.fr home page — mobile emulation, network capped at 1.6 Mbit/s with 150 ms latency, CPU slowed four times, median of three runs.
These measurements describe the site on the day they were taken. They move when the content moves: that is why the date is written next to them.
What the product allows, by design. These are not reported results but consequences of its features and terms, as published on benevenement.fr.
The workspace opens online, with no approval to wait for and no card, and the first edition is complete: no limit on volunteers or duration. An organiser judges the tool on their own edition, not on a demo.
Because roles are separated, the bar lead manages their team and writes to it directly, without access to the contact details of every other volunteer.
Names, phone numbers and emails stay in the tool, per edition, instead of travelling as attachments through six inboxes. They can be exported and deleted whenever the organisation decides.
For an annual event, stations, leads and shifts carry over in one form. Only the volunteers start from scratch: a sign-up is for one edition, and renewing it would mean committing people without asking them.
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