Newday festival underway in the Big tent with a crowd listening to a preach.

How Joyned Transformed Communication at Newday Festival

Building stronger connections, clarity, and coordination for 1,000 Newday volunteers.

project Snapshot

Streamlining Communication and Strengthening Community

Newday partnered with Joyned to centralise messaging, simplify operations, and create richer year-round engagement across its volunteer community. By bringing all communication into one platform, Joyned opened the door to real-time collaboration, improved organisation, and a more connected volunteer experience.

About

Inside Newday Festival

Newday is one of the UK’s largest Christian youth festivals, bringing over 10,000 attendees and 1,000 volunteers together each August. With an incredible number of moving parts and hundreds of teams working simultaneously, communication is essential to ensuring a safe, smooth, and impactful week for everyone on site.

The Challenge

Disconnected Tools, Missed Messages and Limited Engagement

Before adopting Joyned, Newday relied on a fragmented mix of Slack, WhatsApp, text messaging, and email. This created several challenges:

Important updates were routinely lost across different platforms.
Volunteers had limited ways to respond, engage, or give feedback.
Leaders struggled to deliver consistent information to the right groups.
Newday’s desire to build an ongoing community with their OneTeam volunteers was restricted by tools designed for short-term communication rather than long-term connection.

The festival needed a centralised, intuitive solution that could bring all volunteers together both during the event and throughout the year.

Crowds of people lifting their hands in the air in worship.

The Solution

A Unified, Intuitive Platform Built for Engagement

Joyned provided a single, easy-to-use communication hub designed to support both operational clarity and relational community-building. Key capabilities included:

Centralised Communication

All updates, announcements, and conversations were moved into the Joyned platform. This immediately improved clarity, reduced duplicated messages, and helped volunteers stay connected regardless of their role.

During the festival week alone, volunteers and leaders exchanged over 150,000 messages, demonstrating Joyned’s effectiveness in keeping entire teams informed and engaged.

Year-Round Connection

Joyned enabled Newday to maintain communication beyond the festival. Leaders now share ongoing updates, encouragement, and insights with volunteers throughout the year, building stronger emotional connections that helped relationships shift from purely operational to genuinely relational.

Custom Groups and Permissions

Newday created over 100 targeted groups, including logistical channels like a “Resource Needs” group where volunteers could request equipment or materials. This streamlined the resource team’s workflow and ensured faster response times.

"The Joyned app was a game-changer for our team communication: from the user-friendly and clean interface through to the excellent functionality of being able to have different groups and different types of groups for different purposes, this easy to manage app with easy onboarding has vastly improved our ability to communicate with volunteers and increased overall productivity and satisfaction."

Gaz Sims, Head of Newday Operations & Events

The Results

A Game-Changing Transformation in Volunteer Engagement

The introduction of Joyned at Newday delivered outstanding results:

150,000+ messages exchanged over festival week
1,000+ volunteers fully onboarded in just seven days
Over 100 active groups, ensuring tailored communication
First year ever that all volunteers used a single platform for updates and team discussions

Both leadership and volunteers described Joyned as transformative for operations, clarity, and community-building.

“For the first time in Newday history, we had all 1,000 servers on one app, communicating with their teams, all receiving daily Newday updates. Joyned has been a game-changer for building community amongst our Newday One Team and it’s exciting to hear so many churches are now using it.” — Simon Brading

Lessons & Takeaways

What We’ve Learned Together

Through this collaboration, Newday learned that centralising communication into one clear, intuitive platform is essential for managing large volunteer teams. The team also experienced first-hand how tools designed around real workflows can help large groups adopt new systems quickly and confidently.

At Joyned, we discovered that meaningful volunteer engagement goes far beyond operational updates. It’s about strengthening year-round connection, relational communication, and spaces for encouragement that deepen peoples’ emotional investment in each other and the work they do.

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