This would be my 2nd last week of my placement with the St Vincent De Paul Society. How time flies! Through the past few weeks I’ve come to really recognize the importance of internal communication within the society.
Especially with the society consisting of 77 Parish Conferences, 909 Members, 2342 Volunteers, 43 Vinnies Retail/Depot Centres, 14 Special Works etc.... For those who do not know,
Conference: refers to local parishes or school groups established within a local area to provide assistance to people in need through home visitation.
Special Works: are facilities or services run by the Society and arise out of a need which cannot be met within the normal scope of the conference.
A bi-monthly internal newsletter stating latest updates, acknowledgements, events, issues, and profile of different department in the head office is mail out to the conferences, centres, state councils. Whenever appeals or events are about to take place, letters and factsheets are mailed along together as well to make sure the internal stakeholders are well inform and also how they could be involved. Managers in charge of the various centres, membership and conferences regularly arrange meetings with the centres and region conferences to maintain a two way flow of communication as well.
Internal communication seems to be a challenge for charitable organisation on the whole as it is made up of often a large percentage of volunteers that only allows communication through telephone rather than the usual intranet. What do you guys think about this issue?
3 comments:
Dear Sophia,
I found your post very interesting as I am working for a third sector organization as well and one of my recommendations is in regards on the internal communication.
It seems like your organization have a very good system of internal communication. May I ask you do they finance the production of the newsletter, fact sheet and letters because you did not mention if they were sent over the Internet?
I do not really understand why your organization doesn’t communicate with the internal stakeholders via email instead of telephone calls. It’s o much easier! At freehands we communicate via email and we found a program called Dropbox that you can download for free on https://www.dropbox.com/downloading (it’s really worth it). This program allows all the people who downloaded it from the same username to drop a file in it (when you download it, it encourages you to save it on your desktop) and it updates all the other dropbox automatically. The first few gigs are free and it’s not really expensive if you ever need for space. It’s very practical for heavy files such as your newsletter (pdf format). I don’t know if you could apply it at such a large scale with the volunteers but it might work for the different department.
I strongly encourage you to create an emails database of your volunteers though.
Kind regards,
Alix
Hi Alix,
Yeap they do finance the production of the publications. They are usually mail out the to the internal stakeholders.
Pardon me, the different departments do communicate with the internal stakeholders/volunteers via emails.. what I was refering to is that there is also a percentage of volunteers especially the eldery and some whom do not have communicate via email at all..
They do have database of the volunteers at under related departments where they assist with. I'm not so sure if they had the compile all of them though. The DRopbox sounds really interesting!Thanks! Would explore that.. :)
Although I didn’t complete my placement at a not-for-profit organisation, the Department for Communities is still considered to be within the 'Community Services' Sector, so I feel it is one of the only, if not only, Government Departments that is most closely linked to a charity.
Although to my surprise, internal communication within this Department was very casual. During my 20 days (which was spread over approximately 2 months) I never sat in on an official Community Relations meeting. All communication was face-to-face or via email. This was strange for me to comprehend as I have worked in an office environment at a medical practice for the past 4 years and we have regular staff meetings – at least once a month.
I think the newsletters are great, and that would also be perfect at the Department for Communities. They utilise their intranet for a lot of things, and I think a newsletter is more personal. An e-newsletter would probably be more appropriate here though, as they really love technology there!
One of my friends is at The Global Good Foundation completing her placement, and one of the first things she told me when I was speaking to her the other day, was about the trouble she was having with internal communication and keeping tabs on other students and volunteers. The main problem she identified was that although most of the volunteers were dedicated to their community work, they don’t always update others on what tasks they have completed –therefore creating double ups.
Hopefully by developing some sort of intranet or email system internal communications will be easier for them in the future.
Post a Comment