Vivid Sydney (2023–2026)

Vivid Sydney is the Southern Hemisphere’s largest annual light, music, and ideas festival. Spanning 23 days, the event transforms Sydney’s iconic cityscape with immersive light installations, large-scale projections, live music performances, and thought-provoking talks. It attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors from across Australia and around the world and is delivered across multiple high-traffic precincts including Circular Quay, Barangaroo, Darling Harbour, The Rocks, and Central Station.

Since 2023, Casual Hands has led the end-to-end delivery of Vivid Sydney’s volunteer program, acting as the central point of coordination across recruitment, onboarding, training, scheduling, and onsite support. The volunteer program plays a critical role in Vivid Sydney’s success, providing frontline support across guest services, accessibility assistance, event wayfinding, installation supervision, and emergency response roles.

Our responsibilities include:

• Recruitment & Screening: Managing applications from over 1,500 prospective volunteers each year, ensuring role suitability, diversity of availability, and alignment with event needs.
• Training: Delivering both face-to-face and online training to prepare volunteers for their roles, focusing on safety, customer service, communication, and Vivid Sydney-specific protocols.
• Onboarding & Uniforming: Coordinating induction, credentialing, and uniform distribution, including colour-coded uniforms for easy identification of Volunteer Coordinators and Team Members.
• Rostering: Managing over 5,000 shifts via our proprietary platform Luigi Jobs, which enables integrated communication, compliance tracking, and live rostering adjustments.
• Onsite Operations: Deploying an experienced leadership team each night including Volunteer Coordinators, Team Leaders, and Response Coordinators to ensure efficient shift coverage, wellbeing, and real-time problem solving.
• Reporting to DNSW: Provided daily reporting and post-event metrics to Destination NSW, contributing to future planning and continuous improvement of the program.

• Delivered an average of 210 volunteers per night across all precincts during the 23-day festival.
• Trained over 700 volunteers each year, including more than 40 Team Leaders annually.
• Maintained high attendance and low attrition rates through proactive engagement and consistent support.
• Fulfilled over 4,200 shifts annually with real-time backfill and issue resolution systems in place.
• Delivered fast, structured responses to onsite issues through a dedicated team of Response Coordinators.
• Vivid Sydney’s volunteer program – under our management –was recognised with Silver for Best Volunteer Program at the 2025 IFEA Pinnacle Awards. A benchmark in scalable, high-impact workforce delivery, demonstrating how structured support and thoughtful engagement can transform an event from the inside out.

Casual Hands doesn’t just manage volunteers – we operate as a seamless extension of the event delivery team. Our work reduces the operational load on organisers and ensures a polished, guest-ready volunteer workforce each night.

• We use Luigi Jobs to coordinate all scheduling, communication, and compliance across precincts.
• Our human-first approach fosters a positive experience for volunteers while maintaining high levels of operational readiness.
• Our onsite structure gives clients peace of mind, knowing that volunteer logistics are managed by experts – allowing them to focus on broader event execution.

Vivid Sydney’s volunteer program – under our management – is now recognised as a benchmark in scalable, high-impact workforce delivery, demonstrating how structured support and thoughtful engagement can transform an event from the inside out.