Thanks for your replies! Holly, no we don't do yearly themes. But, we are having an ice cream social with our open houses. Got that idea from here, maybe from you! ha ha I just change the boards once a month or so for the seasons or if somethings coming up. I love the idea about hanging pictures from events. I had thought of doing that. I like the volunteer spotlight too. Although I don't think any of our volunteers would willingly agree to it. Do you have to "sneak" and post them??
This last year was the first that i did this, the first two months I had things like 1-where they can volunteer at our school 2-when volunteer orientation was 3-volunteer poems , etc.
Part of our orientation we have volunteers fill out a fun profile the questions are like 1-what is your favorite volunteer moment 2-what do you like best about volunteering 3-favorite saying/pastime 4-years volunteering 5-how many kids,ages, teachers, etc. From those profiles i made wall profiles that had fun tidbits about them. Of course when they were filling it out I told them not to write anything that they wanted to keep private!
So each week i would profile about 4/5 volunteers in our school newsletter and hang their profile on the wall. I also tried to get as many pictures of volunteers as possible and put them all around, by years end i had managed to get about 85 pictures of people volunteering in different ways. In the middle of the board was "A Volunteer is .... someone just like you. I had made wors like part time worker, ful time employee, a teacher, a mom, a dad, a student, etc. I also had a chart that i kept our hours on so that everyone could see how close we were getting to our yearly goal. Since our theme was "volunteering...where dreams take flight" the whole program was stars, and planets! Have fun with it, if people see that it is fun they are more apt to volunteer...right??? I cant wait to do this years!
"When you stop learning you stop growing."
I plan on having a volunteer spotlight on the bulletin board. Wonder if this school has a digital camera? Ha ha. I'd like to do a Volunteer of the month along with a short bio of that person and also have pics of volunteers at work. Maybe we can get a special board for that. I got that idea off here a couple of years ago after I stepped down from being president. I told the other officers, it didn't happen. What do some of you put on your volunteer bulletin board?
one thing that i did toward the end of the year was actually post pictures of events as they happen, it was amazing the number of people and kids who took the time to look at it...great advertising. This year i also did big calendars, a school newsletter look that talked about things going on. The picture thing is something that i will do again! Of course if you dont have a volunteer bulletin board you could highlight them!
"When you stop learning you stop growing."
Do you have a theme to start your year off? Like we're doing an Ice Cream social for our open house and doing everything in an ice cream theme like "here's the scoop", etc.
As to the suggestion of introducing the teachers/staff... for Teacher Appreciation Week we did a "Walk of Fame". Our principal allowed us to paint the concrete in the entry foyer. We painted 2 red carpets then traced big stars with each teacher's name in each one. The teachers and visitors have just loved it. We will now go and paint over the teachers' names that left and add the new teachers' names for the new school year.
