Volunteer Awareness Week is from Sunday 17 June to Saturday 23 June 2012. The national theme is 'Building Communities through Volunteering'. There will be hundreds of events and celebrations across New Zealand in honour of the contribution made by volunteers. How do you plan to pay tribute to your volunteers?

This is an excellent opportunity to engage local media, especially if you are planning something quite unusual or creative to honour your volunteers. Publicity about your event will acknowledge the contribution your volunteers are making to better outcomes in your community. It will also be an opportunity for you to highlight community needs and what your group is doing to address them You can also call for more volunteers, if needed.

The Volunteering Awareness Week web page has useful resources such as a media release template and fact sheet. Contact your local newspaper or radio/TV station well before your event, to give them a ‘heads up’. Depending on the event and other factors, they may choose to send along a reporter and photographer/camera operator. If they say they will do this, be sure to prime your guests so they don’t get caught unawares!

If you get sponsorship for the event, then make that clear. For example, your board chair, whose brother-in-law owns a yacht, may offer to take your volunteers out for a day’s sailing at no charge to your organisation. You need to think how that may look to the outside world – “Charity uses donations for sailing jolly!” If the yacht owner or chairperson does not want publicity, you can say an anonymous supporter kindly paid for the  celebrations so the organisation did not have to spend a cent of its operating budget (if that’s true). Showing you take stewardship seriously will strengthen your organisation’s credibility.

Most of all, honour your volunteers!