Q: What volunteer opportunities are
available?
sharon:
Avon has many opportunities
for volunteers all year long and all pre-walk volunteer opportunities
are open to Walkers as well as family and friends.
Over the course of the year,
the event management team
needs volunteers in their local offices for a variety of tasks:
data entry, mailings, phone calls, and interacting with walkers
and staff.
There are Walker Relations
needs, which include organizing special training walks as well as events
for walkers, volunteers, and crew.
Public Speaking
opportunities are available if you want to “spread the word” about
the Walk. Meet with
civic groups, employee groups, and other venues for walker recruitment,
sponsorship, and fundraising.
If you have a talent for writing,
there’s the Newsletter, which needs writers, editors, and
people to solicit articles.
Event Eve:
Many hands are needed to help with setup the week immediately
preceding the walk, especially on Event Eve.
There are tents to set up, walkers to check-in, materials to hand
out, and pledges to collect. All
3000 walkers will go through a check-in/registration process and each
step needs volunteers; hundreds of us to process all 3000 in one day!
Opening and Closing Ceremonies:
It takes a huge team of support staff to send 3000 walkers on
their way on Day 1 and check them in on Day 2.
Volunteers are needed set up for Opening as well as Closing
ceremonies
Contact your local Avon office to
find out where they need your help.
And remember . . . there is strength
in numbers. Volunteering is
also a good way to bring others into the support network.
If you work for a company with a Community Service Team, enlist
them as volunteers! For Day
Zero of the SF 2000 walk, I had 32 employees (from the Admin Staff all
the way up to the CEO!) staffing the Pledge Center.
We collected over a million dollars in pledges!
If you have a team of volunteers,
contact your local Avon Office and find out what your team can do for
the event. While not the
most glamorous of jobs, a team of 20 or 30 employees in an office
conference room can crank out a mass-mailing during a lunch hour while
it could take the Avon Office Staff the better part of a day to do the
same job. Everything helps
and there is lot to do!
Q: How do you build a volunteer team?
sharon:
All it takes is one individual with infectious enthusiasm!
A team is two or more people working towards a common goal.
We all have at least one friend who would probably love to join
the Avon Breast Cancer Crusade.
Word of mouth among your friends can quickly turn a team of 2
into a team of 10!
But
look in other places to build your team, too.
Work with your employer or church group, and how about the Girl
or Boy Scout Troop one of your kids belongs to.
Scouts and other school groups are always looking for community
activities to get involved in.
Be an organizer and get them going!
Knowing
I wanted to do something for the walk, I mentioned to my Boss (the
Co-Founder and President of the Company) that I wanted to take a couple
days off to participate in Day Zero and Opening Ceremonies.
His response was truly remarkable:
take a few employees with you!
Foolishly, he left that one wide open for me, the opportunist.
One little email that included a link to www.lisa3day.com
was all it took to rally the troops.
Before I knew it, I had 32 employees, including our CEO, begging
to participate.
Imagine having to turn people away because you’ve recruited
almost half the company workforce!
What was the incentive to participate?
Didn’t need one!
The Crusade was incentive enough.
On Day Zero 32 eTimeCapital employees took over the Pledge Center
and worked their 4 hour shift collecting last-minute pledges.
When the afternoon shift of volunteers didn’t show up, what did
we do?
We stayed, of course!
11 hours later, we had collected over One Million dollars and met
some of the most amazing people ever.
Not a single volunteer walked away feeling anything less than
higher than a kite!
