Doing your bit for Charity

We have been pondering about volunteering and doing our bit for charity, mainly prompted by Sarah's strenuous bid to take part in a Dragon Boat race for the Back up Trust in September. We also received some information from Volunteering England last week which has also helped the thought process along.

Did you know that just 14% of small businesses are currently taking advantage of employer supported volunteering (ESV) schemes, and with that in mind Volunteering England has just launched a campaign asking small and medium sized businesses to give more help to charities.

Volunteering England is urging small to medium sized businesses to set up ESV schemes in a campaign, supported by The British Chambers of Commerce, the Federation of Small Businesses, the Forum for Private Business and a range of other industry bodies, which is the culmination of a three year project aimed at developing Employer Supported Volunteering.

It aims to encourage smaller companies - which account for 59% of private sector employment, – to join the ranks of bigger firms that enable employees to volunteer their time to good causes through a work context.

Now you may think that it is all just giving and you don’t have time to do it if you are running a small business, it's all about money making not time giving… but apparently an employer supported volunteering programme can bring considerable benefits; often companies with ESV programmes find that employees are proud to work for them and potential employees want to join them. It often makes a difference with customers too, who feel good about buying from them and can lead to added investment which can't be a bad thing...

You may remember that the highly successful ‘Give a few bob’ campaign? The campaign, launched in June last year, brought the late comedian Bob Monkhouse ‘back to life’ and helped raise over £3m worth of free advertising space for prostate cancer through a massive media promotion. It was developed by a marketing company with around 45 staff, The Communications Agency. So there you go!

If you want to find out more about Volunteer England visit this link http://www.volunteering.org.uk/
and if you want to also get together a dragon boat team for The Back Up Trust to rival Sarah's team 'Truely Oarsome' (geddit???) then visit this link http://www.backuptrust.org.uk/dragon.html