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Foundation News

Volunteer Opportunities with SYCF

7th July 2012

SOUTH YORKSHIRE Community Foundation would be pleased to offer volunteering opportunities in the following areas:

1. MARKETING
2. ADMINISTRATION
3. SECRETARIAL SUPPORT
4. BIDWRITING
5. FUNDRAISING
6. PROJECT PLANNING
7. BUSINESS MENTORING
8. RESEARCH
9. LOCAL CORRESPONDENTS

Volunteer Opportunities with SYCF in more detail:

1.  MARKETING

Project work
We have a number of campaigns about to start. Help is sought from volunteers who wish to gain experience in
″ Writing press releases
″ Creating campaigns
″ Working with the media, including social media
″ Creating attractive and exciting digital material – photos, videos, e-mail marketing shots etc
Ideally would suit someone prepared to give a regular commitment to a number of hours per week, however we are able to consider volunteers on a "per campaign" basis if that is preferred.

Case Studies
We can never have enough inspirational case studies to show the terrific impacts the groups that are funded are achieving and also to demonstrate the significant impacts our donors are achieving through their investments in our communities. We have many more requests and opportunities than we can service, great and inspirational stories to tell, fantastic photos to gather. If you would like to help us collect some or all of these aspects of our case studies, please contact us.

Business contacts
Some of our campaigns require networking with businesses or with business or professional people. We would welcome volunteers who are already networking, who would like to add networking on behalf of SYCF as part of their volunteering activities.

2. ADMINISTRATION

Help is sought from volunteers who wish to gain experience in organisational skills, file management, administration, document retention and retrieval, de-cluttering, tidying, file maintenance, recycling and a myriad of other interesting and not-so-interesting things that are essential to keep an office fully functional! We are happy to accommodate. From one day every so often to more regular support, all welcome!

3. SECRETARIAL SUPPORT

Help is sought from volunteers who wish to offer specific secretarial skills, including shorthand, minute-taking, transcribing from recorded media, editing, proof-reading and other skills related to secretarial work. This work may be possible to do remotely (in the case of transcribing, proof-reading etc.) and in your own time as opposed to working within normal office hours. The work is likely to be irregular in frequency but repetitive, to a certain extent, in nature.

4. BIDWRITING

Opportunities regularly arise that the Foundation would be well-placed to deliver, but which require a time commitment and a specific skillset in order to draft the proposal/bid. Typically it works like buses – there won't be an opportunity for a little while then three come along at once! We are always interested in hearing from people who have experience of bidwriting that would like to help us respond to these opportunities either on their own or as part of a team, or through researching the essential elements to address, or to help in proof reading/evidence testing.

5. FUNDRAISING

For our groups and for local causes
We are about to launch South Yorkshire's presence on www.localgiving.com, where we can showcase local groups and invite online donations to dedicated webpages for each of our groups. Groups need help to tell their messages in such a way that will inspire online donations; they also need help to think of how best they can drive traffic to their webpages through utilising their existing networks in a more focussed way.
For South Yorkshire Community Foundation
As a charity, we depend on donations, too, for our survival. Help is always needed in raising funds for the Foundation's ongoing developments, recommending us as charity of the year to businesses, running marathons in support of the Foundation and generating sponsorship for our activities, to give some examples.

If you know of anyone that may be interested in helping either SYCF or the groups we fund to fundraise, please do get in touch!

6. PROJECT PLANNING

Project planning is an art – the new opportunities we find always need input in terms of project planning to be successful. We welcome any offers of help in this direction, whether it is supporting our existing skills, acting as a sounding board or helping us to create innovative but focussed templates for cohesive planning.

7. BUSINESS MENTORING

One of our new programmes launching in June 2012, Yorkshire Venture Philanthropy,  requires us to gather together a list of potential business mentors for new and expanding social enterprises in South Yorkshire. If you have demonstrable business skills and some free time you are prepared to help a business get off the ground and succeed, we would love to hear from you!

8. RESEARCH

The Community Foundation movement has access to a significant range of tools that help to identify needs in our communities. These databases are enormous, have tremendous potential to inform investments in our communities, and are highly addictive – you have been warned!
We would love to have the time to really explore these founts of knowledge and bring research into our communities to the forefront of the information we can provide. This will inspire donors and partners to invest in sustaining South Yorkshire's future communities. If you have a penchant for gathering lots of facts and figures and love nothing better than to get to the bottom of what the numbers are saying, we think we have a challenge that you just might find irresistible!

9. LOCAL CORRESPONDENTS

We are always interested in hearing news stories from our local communities.  Local people have a much better handle on what drives local communities and what is ""new" there. We are interested long term in creating a small network of "citizen journalists" and our first step in this direction is to look for some local correspondents to get the ball rolling. If you think this could be something you could do, and would like to know more, please let us know.

 If you're interested in knowing more, do please get in touch:

Email - admin@sycf.org.uk
Phone - 0114 2424857
Fax - 0114 2424605.

We look forward to hearing from you!