A little birdie helped us out recently to learn more about nonprofit marketing.

The graphic birdie image pictured above sits in the “1, 2, 3 Marketing Tree”, developed by Mills Communications Group’s founder Erica Mills, who was in Victoria in mid-July to teach a workshop for Volunteer Victoria.  Erica delivered “Nonprofit Marketing: Make the Most of What You’ve Got!” to a collection of our member agencies – and the workshop was a fantastic success.

Nonprofit Marketing: As easy as 1, 2, 3]

In early May we held a workshop taught by facilitator Martin J. Cowling, CEO of People First – Total Solutions and an expert in volunteer management.  Martin hails from Australia; we first welcomed him to Victoria three years ago when he taught two half-day workshops for us on topics related to managing volunteers.

Since Martin was very well received here in 2007, (his first time training in Canada!) we asked him to come back this year.  He delivered a full-day workshop entitled “How to Turn Your Organization into a Volunteer Magnet” to 37 participants, who all have roles managing volunteers at their organizations.

The ...

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“What’s happening isn’t going to get better – that’s what we all believe. It might even get worse.”

Those were the cautionary words of fundraising expert Judy Lightwater when she gave the workshop, “Fundraising in Challenging Economic Times”, to a group of Volunteer Victoria’s member agencies this past March. She was talking about the state of our economy and the significant impact it has had on the ability of nonprofit agencies to seek out and receive funding from external sources. “You have to be even more concise than you used to be,” Lightwater advised, referring to the way agencies write funding proposals. ...

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A couple of weeks ago we offered a free training session to our member agencies on “The Ins and Outs of Criminal Record Checks” with presenter Denise Girvin from the Victoria Police.  Girvin, a criminal records specialist with the Victoria Police for the last seven years, gave us detailed information to help clarify our understanding of the criminal records check process and how it works within the City of Victoria in particular. 

To apply for a criminal record check, an individual wishing to volunteer who lives in the City of Victoria must go in person to the Victoria Police and fill out a form, providing ...

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This past December and January we ran two “Introduction to Twitter” sessions for individuals at our nonprofit member agencies who were interested in learning more about Twitter, the free social media tool.  The sessions were very well received and we were able to share some of Volunteer Victoria’s own story about how we have been successful with our social media campaign – in particular with our use of Twitter – since we began it last year.

The workshops were for beginners so we thought it best to start with simply talking about Twitter itself and why and how people use it.  Not surprisingly though, at ...

[Continue reading Hootsuite Makes Using Twitter Even Better]

I’d like to welcome Charles Troger, PMP from Treehouse Consulting as today’s guest blogger.  He’ll be teaching our upcoming workshop, scheduled for Feb 25, 2010, on “Managing for Success: Project Management for the Non-Profit Sector.”  In this post Charles talks about the crucial elements of time, cost and quality that will help you define the success of your projects. 

In the world of project management, a “project” is considered to be a temporary endeavour that can be anything from creating this year’s annual report to planning and implementing a new program.  When you use ...

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Having done extensive research on Social Media over the past five months or so, I was somewhat reluctant to attend Margaret Hoegg’s beginner level presentation on Twitter. Contributing significantly to this reluctance was the fact that, of all the social media I had researched, Twitter seemed the least desirable to me. Margaret managed to change my mind, however, as she pointed out the very tangible benefits of Twitter.  I have since started using Twitter extensively to promote my personal blog. So, I have converted to Twitter. Let me tell you why.

The benefits of non-profit organizations’ (NPOs) use of Twitter are ...

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If you’ve lived in Victoria for any length of time, you will undoubtedly have heard people talking about “the big one.”  When will the big earthquake hit, we wonder.  And will we be prepared when the time comes?

Although it is important to plan how our organizations will react to a large full-scale earthquake, it is equally important to plan how we will react to smaller, more day-to-day emergencies.  That is the message that the Victoria Emergency Management Agency (VEMA) and the Canadian Red Cross gave to non-profit organizations the other day in our half-day workshop on ”Emergency Preparedness for Voluntary Sector Organizations.”

Facilitators Sara Walsh, Elysia ...

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Today I’d like to welcome Yasmin Rampuri from the Inter-Cultural Association of Greater Victoria who has written the following guest blog post for us about her experiences taking our recent Overview of Volunteer Management certificate course.  Congratulations to all 23 of our 2009 course graduates! 

Over four Saturdays in October and November I had the great pleasure of attending Volunteer Victoria’s excellent Overview of Volunteer Management Course.  The course was facilitated by two engaging and very experienced leaders in the Volunteer Management field, Diane Kirby and Theresa Vogel.  Each of them led two of the Saturdays, and brought their different styles to ...

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The other day we held a workshop for individuals taking part in our Social Solutions project, which supports coordinators of volunteers at non-profit agencies that work in the areas of homelessness, housing, mental health and addictions.  The workshop was about resetting boundaries and was led by talented facilitator Dvora Levin.

Who among us couldn’t use a reminder to set (or defend) our boundaries now and then?  The workshop came at a very fortuitous time for some participants in particular, but in fact all of us were able to come up with areas of either our personal or professional lives where we could reestablish or reset ...

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