In April we once again marked MS Awareness Week. For the second year running we partnered with six MS charities, including MS Trust and MS Together, and launched a united campaign, MS Unfiltered.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Volunteers’ Week. It kicks off on Monday 3 June and runs until Sunday 9 June.

Volunteers’ Week is a time for charities, voluntary groups, social organisations, and volunteers themselves to come together. And it’s a time to recognise the incredible impact that volunteering has on communities around the UK.

Celebrate with us!

We'll be doing lots to showcase the incredible impact our volunteers have on the MS community, and we'd love for you to be involved.

This month, we wanted to share with you some of the key features of Assemble, our new volunteer management system (VMS), which is launching later this year. Wherever we can, we’ve built the system to simplify processes our volunteers complete.

Assemble will also take on much of the functionality currently held within the Portal and volunteer website. Both of these sites will retire at the end of the year once we have Assemble up and running.

An introduction to community research work from Emily Perriam, Head of Volunteering and Community Networks

Last month, we shared information about a new project kicking off at the MS Society. Project Mead is looking at how we deliver our services, how we innovate them to offer more choices, and how we can further support the MS community. Ultimately, we want to improve and increase our reach to positively impact more people. And volunteers play a huge part in how we do that.

We updated you earlier in the year about some changes to the Volunteering and Community Networks Team. We’re now delighted to let you know about some key appointments.

Emily Perriam

Interim Head of Volunteering and Community Networks

We’re pleased to tell you that we’ve been offered digital billboard space up to the value of £500,000 to use throughout 2024, at no cost!

We want to say a big thank you to the agency, 75 Media, which has generously offered us their roadside billboard spaces for free. Their Operations Manager Alex’s mum lives with MS, and he wanted more people to know about multiple sclerosis and the MS Society.

75 Media is the UK’s number one agency for roadside boards, so this is a huge opportunity to get the MS Society’s name out there in the public domain.

Our face-to-face fundraising campaign, using professional fundraisers, will restart later this month. The pilot, at the end of last year, was a great success. So we're keen to start more conversations and encourage more people to support our work.

During the pilot we spoke to more than 160,000 people about MS and the MS Society. And 1,848 people kindly set up a new monthly direct debit.