“I’m not a volunteer – I’m securing my future and contributing to society”

Featured on the Manchester Leadership Program Blog - http://leadershipvolunteering.wordpress.com/2-talking-to-organisations/

So here I am, delighted at being asked to write a post for the MLP blog and, for once, stuck for words.

Having looked through some of the past blog posts (try saying that after a few pints!), there’s no posts that focus on how volunteering adds value to your careers in any detail, so that’s what I hope to touch on in this post.

I’ve been where you are. At University and living the “student lifestyle” of work hard, play harder. With the employment climate as bad as it is, there was always that cloud hanging over my head – will I get a job when I finish my degree?!

I’ll be blatant here. I have friends who graduated before me, over 3 years ago, who are still stacking shelves and pulling pints. And it’s not for the want of trying. A number of them applied for literally hundreds of graduate level and middle management jobs and got absolutely nowhere.

On the flip side, I have graduate friends that are earning a lot of money in companies like BT, Lloyds TSB, Balfour Beatty and Zara.

So what’s the difference between the two? Volunteering. For the sake of this post – skill exploration and development.

All of the successful people above engaged in a lot of volunteering, which gave them the opportunity to do three key things:

1.       Explore new skills

2.       Develop and fine tune existing skills

3.       Demonstrate their capabilities to employers

Programs like MLP are incredibly important – not only do they give you the opportunity to do all of the above things; they also train you to be reflective and dissect your skills. This is very important when it comes to writing CVs and being outstanding at interviews.

To demonstrate this, I will take an example from the “Great Fundraise” post on the 5^th March.

“The Barnardos group put their entrepreneurial skills to the test by selling Oriental food outside the Sugden Sports centre after sporting events. They were able to manage their stock and finances by setting up an online ordering service which proved really useful for their team – well done!”

So what does this one paragraph demonstrate?

The biggest thing that jumps out at me is the online ordering system – Setting up something like this on any scale will need careful planning, development and monitoring. They also tapped into a very fragile market – how many times have you gone to the gym and visited McDonald’s on the way home?! I know I have. Visionaries in the making!

A task like this would require a good level of team work to ensure its success. Who sources the food, and from where? Who is responsible for cooking it safely? Who is responsible for marketing the activity? Who set up the online ordering service?

This one task can be broken down into a number of skill areas, giving you extra ammunition for your CVs and Interviews.

One thing to remember is that size doesn’t matter (lol).

 Regardless of how big your event is, or who you volunteer for, you are still demonstrating the same skills. The key is to do it regularly and ensure you reflect on what you’ve done. In work, you’ll have regular one-to-ones with your manager for this very purpose, so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t do it with your volunteering (or assignments for that matter!).

Being aware of the skills you are demonstrating, and especially identifying what you need to improve, will lead you into a constant cycle of self-development and ultimately, a tidy career!

I always wanted to be a pilot, but during college I didn’t have the drive or ambition to put effort into my professional development. My easy route out was to be a P.E. Teacher. Neither happened.

Through volunteering and professional development, I find myself in a position where I get to work with and inspire volunteers on a daily basis. I meet people that, piece by piece, are changing the world. Every little bit of volunteering they do makes a difference to them and to the people they are helping, and employers LOVE to see that.

Competition is rife for any job with employers often sifting through hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of applications. Believe me, it’s a boring process which means It’s more important than ever to stand out - and volunteering will help you do that.

So what’s my advice? Talk to the guys and girls at MLP (they’re very good!), join V-inspired, and check out the Five Minute Fundraiser on the Institute of Fundraising website.

If you can, find yourself a mentor, and remember to always record and reflect on your volunteering.

I think I’ve said enough for this post, but before I sign off, it’s my turn to invite you to join us at The Children’s Air Ambulance.

Good luck with your upcoming exams and dissertations, and for those of you about to join me in the big bad world – I’ll see you there!

@TCAADave.

The Internet is for two things...

Sharing information and wasting time.

Today, I'm wasting time!

After writing my post for the University of Manchester MLP blog my productiveness has disappeared and images like this creep into IE:

On the notion of dogs - here's my Sister's dog chilling out (no he wasn't supposed to be chewing on my nephew's dummy):

Anyway, the F1's on now so I'll post properly when the MLP post goes out!

< Guest Post > Manchester Leadership Program - Students That Change The World

im·pact           noun                Pronunciation: /ɪmpakt/

• The action of one object coming forcibly into contact with another
• Marked effect or influence

We love shouting about what our students get up to. Mainly because students often get bad press about being lazy, beer-guzzling specimen. However, our team on the Manchester Leadership Programme (MLP) know different to this common misconception.

A bit of basics before we get started….

The Manchester Leadership Programme is an accredited module students can take at The University of Manchester, combining academic study with volunteering. Once they’ve completed both elements of the module, students receive the Manchester Leadership Award – bronze, silver or gold, depending on how many hours they volunteer (20 hours, 40 or 60).

Last academic year, a whopping 1,206 students took the module, and 83% completed their volunteering commitment.

This translates as 48,114 hours of volunteering. If it was turned into working solidly, with no breaks or sleep, it works out as five and a half years volunteering for one person, and divided into working days, would be 26.5 years!

In its six years that the MLP has been running, financial contribution through volunteering totals almost three quarters of a million pounds.

But, enough about us...

We couldn’t have achieved these facts and figures without all the amazing organisations that provide us with so many volunteering opportunities, and of course the dedicated students we work with on a daily basis. We work with over 300 organisations on a regional and national scale, and so the scope of what our students get up to is huge!

To start things off, I’d like to talk about a volunteering initiative we run every February during Student Volunteering Week, dubbed ‘The Great Fundraise’. Students project manage fundraising events for a chosen charity, and then run these events during, or soon after, Student Volunteering Week. This year, we had seven groups of students each supporting a different charity and collectively they raised over £3,000.

One charity selected by students was none other than The Children’s Air Ambulance themselves. Lindsey Milton, Erin Mills and Emily Prieditis chose this charity to focus their fundraising efforts, and enthusiastically began brainstorming ideas from the word go.

We delivered a fundraising training session for participating students, and saw the creative sparks fly, as each group bounced ideas around the room. Granted, we had to tame some of the wilder ideas (one group were keen to host a ‘wet t-shirt’ competition(!)), but it was great to see these ideas blossom into something workable.

The Children’s Air Ambulance Trio straight away knew to tailor their fundraising activities to the nature of the charity. They hosted a pub quiz which had a strong correlation with children, youth and The Children’s Air Ambulance, and have just completed a sponsored walk to Bury. Donations are still coming in strong so we don’t yet know the combined final total for this group, but you can donate to the girls’ JustGiving page here!

The ‘The Children’s Air Ambulance Trio’ were “thrilled” to have been asked to volunteer long term with the charity – a challenge they are “looking forward to”, which demonstrates the sustainable impact this volunteering has had.

The beauty of working with over 1,300 volunteers this academic year is the variety of people we meet. I’d like to think this is reflected in the diverse range of volunteering projects MLP students take part in.

A bit of a break down…

‘Operation Impact’ is something we run bi-annually. It’s a week long, large-scale volunteering project in which 200+ students physically transform a different community space each day. Past beneficiaries have included schools, a scout hut, sheltered accommodation grounds and more. The visual impact that the students have made on these community spaces would put DIY SOS and Ground Force to shame!

We also offer these types of projects on a smaller scale in the way of something called ‘MLP Challenges’ – one day events that aim to challenge students to make a difference with a particular organisation.

The variety of MLP Challenges is immense, which makes the old 9-5 stint very interesting! Take last month, for example, we ran 19 Challenges over a five-day period. These ranged from putting on talent shows for service users in a resource centre for older people, hosting a ‘blind bowling’ fundraising evening in aid of RNIB, decorating rooms and painting a mural for a local resource centre for children and young people, to habitat protection tasks in local parks.

It’s clear to see what a positive impact the students are creating when this level of volunteering occurs in just five days!

For the meaty, juicy volunteering initiatives we have ‘MLP Challenge Projects’. They usually run for about six to eight weeks. Students work with an organisation on developing a project, idea or event. The impact of these projects are immense; they give students a real sense of ownership, in everything from providing IT lessons to ‘Silver Surfers’, to creating ‘sensory story books’ for adults with learning disabilities.   

Projects that wholly make a difference to the local community are student-led projects; these usually run over a whole semester or an entire academic year. Normally there are about ten projects, all of which give students absolute ownership over the planning, creativity and implementation of supporting a diverse range of organisations. This year’s student-led groups have supported Cancer Research UK, Baguely Sure Start Centre, Oxfam, After Adoption, Barnardos, and READ International, to name a few.

‘Impact’ is a funny way to describe how the student volunteers make a difference in their community, given that the common definition of impact is “…one object coming forcibly into contact with another.”

At first, this appears boisterous and unruly. Yet, if you take ‘object’ to be the body of students, and ‘forcibly’ to describe the sheer dedication and energy that students give to each project, I can safely say MLP students definitely do, make an impact.

If you want to find out more about the MLP or volunteering with The University of Manchester then by all means, visit our webpage:

www.mlp.manchester.ac.uk/volunteering/

We also blog quite a bit, too; you can read all about that here.

You can also follow us on TWITTER and FACEBOOK.

< Guest Post > TerryMc Photography - "Taking Pictures for the Press"

Terry McNamara is an excellent photographer who worked on the Children's Air Ambulance "Leap into Action" campaign in the North West. His great photos are being used by the charity in a number of our publicity materials, both online and printed. He very kindly offered to write a post advising us camera novices on how to take a good photo for the press. Please welcome Terry, and take a look at his site - http://www.terrymcphotography.co.uk/ you can also follow him on twitter - @terrymcphoto or email him on terry@terrymcphotography.co.uk

Taking Pictures for the Press

As more and more newspapers are reducing the number of staff photographers they employ, it is becoming more important for event organisers to have their own photographers present. It is, therefore, also important to understand the type of images that the newspapers are likely to use or likely to reject.
Here are some of my tips for taking press images.

Fill the Frame
This is one of the first photography techniques I teach my students. Before you take the image, have a good look all around the view finder. Make sure your main subject fills the frame. Our brain cuts off anything we don’t feel is relevant, but unfortunately our camera doesn’t. Therefore, when we see the image we’ve taken we suddenly find that the main subject is tiny and surrounded by a lot of space.

Get the Eyes
If you are photographing people, make sure the eyes are in focus and are looking at you. If the eyes are sharp other areas of the image that are not quite in focus will be overlooked. Obviously, aim to get the whole image in focus, but you absolutely must have the eyes in focus.
Make sure the eyes are looking at you and are open! When taking a group shot at an event it is highly likely that someone will be distracted by what is going on around them and will look away just at the point you take the picture. Make a lot of noise. Keep telling the group that you need their attention and keep checking through the viewfinder.
Also, people blink. They do it all the time. When you have a group of people posing for a photograph the chances of one of them blinking just when you take the picture are multiplied. A blink only lasts a fraction of a second. Therefore, take several shots in rapid succession and before the group disassembles check the back of your camera to make sure you have all eyes open.

Tell the Story
Once upon a time photographs were used to support the text in a newspaper article. Then, in the 1940’s, that all changed and the picture became the story with the text supporting the picture.
In these current times of instant everything, the average attention span is dramatically reducing. When you think about the shots you take, assume that nobody will read the text unless the image first grabs their attention. Make sure people can look at the image and immediately understand what is going on.

Think About the Background
It does matter what is behind the subject in the image. If the background is too cluttered it will become a distraction. Also, keep an eye out for objects that might look odd in the image – poles growing out of people’s heads etc.
Where possible get some distance between your subject and the background. This will give your image more impact and make your subject more noticeable. If you must use a wall as a background get your subjects to stand at least 2 metres away from it (unless the wall is important to the story). That way the wall is likely to be thrown out of focus. If you are taking your image at an event and there is likely to be a lot of people in the background, pull your subject as far away from the rest of the people as possible. Again, this will give your subject some separation from the surroundings and make them more noticeable rather than being lost in a crowd.

Get Some Activity in the Shot
If the event includes lots of activity, capture some in your shot. There’s nothing worse than seeing an image of a group of people standing still when the event had lots of excitement and movement. If it’s a sponsored run get pictures of people running, if it’s a netball match get pictures of people shooting for the net. They don’t have to be live pictures. You can separate a group of people, give them instructions and then shoot away.

Don’t Forget the Cute Factor
Everybody loves cute pictures. OK, not quite everybody, but the newspapers do. A cute picture of a child will almost certainly get in the papers. It adds the ‘aww’ factor – the human interest factor. Local papers love images of local children.

Call in the Professionals
If you are staging an event and want some publicity in the media, now is not the time for someone to pull out a phone-camera and snap away thinking that the Nationals will beat a path to your door wanting to print the images. Neither is it the time for someone with a half-decent camera and good intentions. Make sure that whoever has the responsibility for taking pictures at your event really understands what they are doing, how to create pictures that the press will use and how to use the equipment properly.
The key word in the above sentence is ‘create’. The images from your event should be created and not just snapshots of opportunities that present themselves. Carefully plan and stage each image.
Your organisation’s reputation hangs on the quality of the images submitted to the press. Thousands (if not millions) of people will see them. If in doubt, call in a professional photographer with experience of submitting images to the press. The cost may not be as high as you think and the benefits will be endless.

As a fundraiser, photography is important. We need to be able to capture images from events and people that we meet that are suitable for the press and other media streams. As Terry rightly says above, quality images that capture the essence of your story make a huge impact. If the images are dull, badly framed and not "tight", they won't get published, or they won't reflect your organisation properly.

Thanks Terry, I look forward to working with you again!

My next guest blog is from the University of Manchester Career Development Team, but before then, one of my posts will feature on the Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce Blog on Friday 13th April (unlucky for some!).

Keywords: event, freelance, manchester, news, newspaper, newspapers, paper, papers, photographer, photographers, photography, pr, press, publicity