If you’re a Support Volunteer you’ll have access to three mailboxes; your personal MS Society mailbox, your group mailbox and the support mailbox. These can all be accessed via your MS Society Office 365.
The support mailbox has been set up to ensure any personal details of the people you’re communicating with are kept confidential. Only Support Volunteers have access to MS Society support mailboxes.
For a group to submit a Gift Aid claim, they must hold a valid charity number. Unfortunately, HMRC no longer accept our groups registering for their own charity numbers. If your group registered before January 2019, you can continue to submit Gift Aid claims – but this may change in the future.
At the end of February, we launched a new GDPR eLearning called Keeping Data Safe. Since then, we’ve been sending the eLearning out to the first group of volunteers in certain roles who need to complete it. We’ve had a great response so far, so thanks to those of you who have already completed it.
We know our volunteers make great use of MS Society information resources to support people with MS and their families, health and social care professionals.
We want to update you on how our information is changing and why. And also to let you know how we’ll keep you better informed of updates.
New formats and old
Our information now comes in many shapes and sizes – printed booklets, web pages, factsheets to download, online videos, animations and e-learning.
Our Volunteer Voice sessions are your chance to join a virtual get together of senior leaders and fellow volunteers to hear updates from across the organisation, and to raise questions and issues that are important to you.
As well as hearing from Nick Moberly, our Chief Executive Officer, each session has a theme based on updates or projects which may be of interest to volunteers. After this 15-minute segment, the rest of the session is dedicated to discussion and responding to questions or queries. You can ask questions in advance, or bring them up on the day.
In an email at the end of January, we were delighted to share the work we’ve been doing to develop our Volunteer Recognition Scheme - a fresh new way to acknowledge commitment, achievement and success. We outlined the principles of the scheme, and the key elements to look out for. If you missed it, you can read about this here.
MS Awareness Week 2022 will run from Monday 25 April to Sunday 1 May. It’s a really important time for us to come together, speak out and raise awareness of MS –both in the media and amongst the community. MS Awareness Week is run by the MS Society. Other MS charities (like MS Trust) may run their own campaigns, but they’ll raise awareness during the same week.
The Volunteering Team are holding a virtual event to welcome and induct volunteers into the MS Society. The event will last 2.5 hours and we’ll be covering:
We’re really looking forward to sharing our ambitious plans for Community Networks over the next five years with you.
We want to develop a strong, vibrant, diverse, and connected network of communities supporting people to live well with MS. We hope you can join one of our Zoom sessions to hear about how we’d like to achieve this, together.
Head of Community Networks, David Light, will be leading the session and will be giving an overview of our plans to create:
Our 2022 Annual Lecture will take place on Wednesday 8 June at 7.15pm at the Royal College of Physicians in London. It's a key feature of the Stop MS Appeal, giving donors and supporters the chance to hear about the latest in MS research from eminent scientists.
