Event Planning

The United Nations General Assembly has mandated December 5^th each year as “International Volunteer Day.” This day is viewed as a unique chance for volunteers and organizations to celebrate their efforts, to share their values, and to promote their work among their communities, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), government, and the private sector. 

Armed with social media hashtags and themes, organizations around the world utilized this day in 2017 to highlight the work of their volunteers. In this Voices, writer Allyson Drinnon shares stories from individuals and their different organizations on how they used this day to recognize volunteers. What worked? What did not? Can you effectively recognize volunteers in a single day? Through Drinnon’s report, it may be possible to start planning for the 2018 International Volunteer Day event right now!

Free, live-streaming video platforms like Facebook Live, Twitter’s Periscope, and YouTube Live allow users of smartphones or tablets to live stream something they are viewing in person so that people off-site can view and share in it, too, in real-time – events, speeches, announcements, celebrations, and more.

The keyword here is live. Viewers watch the video at the same time it’s being filmed. While videos are recorded on Facebook and available after the live event (just like on YouTube), the draw for Facebook viewers is that they can view the event as it is happening, in real time. As with other Facebook posts, they can even join in by commenting.

Could Facebook Live and other live-streaming video platforms be used to celebrate volunteers? Welcome new volunteers? Educate and train volunteers? Recruit new volunteers? “Sure!” argues Jayne Cravens, an internationally-recognized volunteer management researcher, consultant, and trainer. In this e-Volunteerism feature, Cravens outlines some captivating ideas for how to embrace live-streaming video platforms to benefit volunteer engagement, noting that you can even “plan out” your video ahead of time. “It doesn’t have to be entirely spontaneous,” writes Cravens. “It just needs to feel that way.” 

We love our volunteers—and we want them to know it. We all know it’s important to say “thank you” and to let volunteers know they’re appreciated. And although funds may be limited, we still want the recognition to be meaningful. The good news is that many volunteers prefer informal and ongoing signs of appreciation rather than a formal, public event.

If you’re looking to upgrade your volunteer recognition, this Along the Web column by Faye C. Roberts includes ideas you can use throughout the year. Some ideas will have special appeal for specific groups such as school, youth, or church-affiliated volunteers, but most are easily adapted to broader audiences. And as Roberts explains, if you want to learn the very best ways to recognize your volunteers, “Ask them.”

While living in India, Israeli citizen Yael Caplin experienced the Purna Kumbh Mela - a remarkable religious gathering that takes place in Haridwar, where the Ganges enters the Northern plains of India from the Himalayas.  Every 12 years, from mid-January to the end of April, the city turns into what some believe is the world’s largest religious congregation. It is estimated that a total of 40 million pilgrims bathed in the Ganges at Haridwar during the three-month celebration in 2010.

Apart from the sheer magnitude of the event, the Purna Kumbh Meia is an extraordinary example of volunteers in action. In this article, Caplin shares her personal observations as she describes the unique volunteering experience she witnessed.

With the world’s largest sporting event, the FIFA World Cup, recently winding up in Germany, we at e-Volunteerism decided it was time to turn our attention to the nuances involved in volunteering and volunteer management practices within the context of hosting major events.

Major events utilize the support of thousands of volunteers which, by sheer weight of numbers, creates management complexities not experienced by volunteer managers working in more conventional kinds of volunteering.   Some of these issues, which we discuss in this Roundtable, include:

• Infrastructure and planning required for handling such a vast workforce
• Transference of volunteers, skills and knowledge across nations
• Pressures of working to complex and finite time lines
• Importance of reward and recognition of major event volunteers
• Utilization of volunteers themselves in the management and training of other volunteer team members

This Keyboard Roundtable offers a variety of opinions from volunteerism leaders around the world, involved in coordinating volunteer effort across a wide range of major events. We invite you to learn about this unique style of volunteer involvement from their experiences.

Through several years of working in public relations (PR) and journalism, I've heard many publicity officers of social and sporting clubs and PR officers of non-profit organisations complain they are not getting 'enough exposure': 'I sent a release to The Times last week, and they didn't publish it' or 'I e-mailed a three-page letter on the annual general meeting two days ago, and the radio station didn't put a word of it to air'.

Having studied both public relations and journalism, I know that newspapers and the radio/television media, especially outside of capital cities, are always on the lookout for good local items of interest. I also know that there are rules that the media themselves must follow, in order to meet their own time lines.

If we learn to submit a press release using the right procedure, and if we do it right, it will go to air or be put into print. That is the basis of this article.