We’ve had some staff changes in the Volunteering and Community Networks Team that we wanted to let you know about.
Sam Walker, Executive Director of Services Support, leaves us on 9 February after more than six years at the MS Society. Sam has decided to take some time out before taking on her next challenge. We’re delighted that Gavin Atkins has just joined us as interim cover. Gavin has spent the last 11 years at the mental health charity, Mind, and has recently stepped down as their Associate Director of Communities.
We want to make sure that everyone who contacts us, for whatever reason, has an experience that meets their needs. So, we're conducting research into the different ways people interact with us — volunteering, campaigning, donating, using our services and support, etc.
We’d like to hear about your experiences of dealing with the MS Society. What do we do well, and what could we do better?
You can help improve the services and support we deliver to you and everyone who needs them.
We're pleased to introduce the Breathing Space Project for unpaid carers in Wales until March 2025. The project, which is funded by the Welsh Government, extends support to those caring for people living with MS by providing short breaks.
Whether you, or someone you know, is caring for a person full-time or for a few hours a week, for example, by collecting a person’s medication or providing transport to hospital appointments, Breathing Space may be able to offer some extra support.
You're hopefully well aware of why we use 'BCC' in our email communications to multiple recipients. It means nobody can see anybody else's email address, and therefore keeps personal data safe. But - usually due to human error - mistakes can happen and cause a data incident.
An incident can also happen when we select an incorrect recipient through the auto-fill fields, and share information not intended for them. Either event can cause anxiety for those whose personal contact information was shared without their permission.
The Health and Safety Team would like to say a big thank you to all the groups who worked hard in 2023 to implement our health and safety requirements.
We hope you were able to join us last Thursday (30 November) when we came together to celebrate the impact our volunteers make and recognise outstanding individual contributions.
The star-studded event was hosted by comedian and MS Society Ambassador, Ivo Graham and live streamed on Facebook and YouTube. Thanks to our judging panel, those of you who tuned in, and to those who nominated a volunteer/local group for going above and beyond. And of course, our deserving volunteers who were finalists and winners!
We've just launched our pilot face-to-face fundraising campaign. The pilot will last for four months and will happen across the UK.
We'll be using paid, professional fundraisers who are based all around the UK and will be fundraising on our behalf.
With our new fundraising programme, we're hoping to raise an additional £5m of unrestricted income over the next five years.
We know that you may have questions about this, so we've tried to answer them below:
We emailed on 21 November to let you know about changes to the Portal functionality. This means that, for now, you'll need to email the Volunteer Support Team (VST) to request contact data for your group. You can read more about this here if you missed the email.
We’re beginning to make changes to our systems ahead of next year, when we’ll be transforming our IT systems and processes to make them simpler for volunteers and staff to use. The first volunteering system to be updated will be the Portal.
In the short term, this update will mean that, while you’ll still be able to upload services and events to the Portal, you’ll no longer be able to download contact data for your group. We’ll be developing a new and improved way for you to do this.
