Project: Together we can change lives! 1

8 Sep 2013   | Projects · Scouting

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Scouting is a charity, all the leaders are volunteers, volunteers who commit a huge amount of time to helping young people get the most of out life. 4th Golcar provides fun and adventure to over 200 young people each and every week, but a lack of adult support was a growing concern for both the leader team and the trustees.

The Leaders and the trustees were having to put more and more time into fundraising and running group events, for the events to go ahead with very little support or even very little attendance in some cases. The team were getting frustrated, they could not provide all the exciting opportunities to the young people, without the support of one group of  key stakeholders… the parents.

The idea was discussed one evening, why don’t we create a video showcasing what we do, and get the young people to explain the need for help and support.

Our brief was simple, we needed each family to volunteer with us for just one hour each year. If every family provided just one volunteer, for just one hour each year, that would give us a huge 200 extra volunteer hours every year!

How we did it:

So along comes Group Camp; I’ve arranged for one of our Assistant Explorer Scout Leaders to bring along his camera with external microphone so we can capture video and audio in high quality. I’ve also wrote a script for the young people to read out.

Over the weekend we filmed fourteen young people, some saying the whole script, others saying small extracts that we can use to when editing to allow the film to flow.

After the camp I spent the following week (around my full time employment) editing video and music to make our idea a reality.

The Result:

The finished product:

Roll out:

With any good campaign, I had to plan and deliver a roll out that would benefit the charity.

We decided to invite all parents to meetings just before the end of the section meetings, so parents had to arrive just 10 minutes early to collect their child at the end of their scouting night.

We (GSL, Chairman and myself) ran and delivered the video to groups of parents in five different meetings through the week.

I had created some sign up forms, asking for simple contact information, that would sign up parents to our Fourth Adult Support Team (FAST). FAST is a mailing list of our flexible volunteers, who when we need some extra help or support we drop them a email and they let us know how and when they can help us out.

After the final meeting, finishing at 9pm on the Friday, we published our video on youtube, jumped on twitter and facebook and started to spread the message.

Within 30 minutes our video campaign was being shared in Canada and over the weekend all around the world.

All in all we received 68 volunteers who all signed up to help us for at least one hour a year. Thank you to everyone who supported us and an even bigger thank you to all the volunteers who signed up!

Social Media:

Here are just a few of the responses we received:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One comment on “Project: Together we can change lives!”

  1. Pingback: Project: Together we can change lives! – via Daniel Haigh A Personal Blog… | Leader Daze

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