Project Elf
Volunteers are the lifeblood of our organisation and we encourage our office based staff to give it a go! Christmas 2018 marked our biggest Operation Elf yet, with over 150 office staff going to our retail stores throughout the country to serve our customers and spread some festive cheer!
Melissa's experience
Melissa Leeks, Recruitment Partner for Retail, volunteered in her local Clapham Junction branch and explains what she got up to elfing out.
Last week I donned my Christmas jumper and went Elfing for the day at my local Clapham Junction shop. I was welcomed by the lovely Assistant Store Manager, Julia, and volunteer Margaret who's helped out every Wednesday for the past 7 years!
Julia and Margaret showed me around the shop and explained the tasks that I could help with. It was a very busy day and there was a lot to help out with. I started by sorting through donated stock and moved on to tagging items later in the day.
Whilst I was there someone brought in a massive bag of donations - it felt like Christmas had come early. I found some amazing items whilst sorting through everyone's donations but it also opened my eyes into the weird and wonderful things that are also donated to us!
Later in the day I helped sort through a delivery of our Christmas New Goods which had arrived and I got a chance to see what fab products and Christmas gifts we are selling this year - anyone who's stuck for secret Santa gifts, look no further!
I really enjoyed getting to know the staff and volunteers who displayed so much passion and enthusiasm for the BHF and their roles. They’re all so hard-working and I couldn’t believe the amount of donations they have to sort through on a day to day basis! They were also very helpful and answered all of the questions that I had about the shop.
I really enjoyed the Elfing experience as it gave me such a good insight in to retail and reminded me just how busy our shops are and the hard work that goes in to running a successful store.
I found it to be a valuable experience and would recommend to all office staff members- you would be doing such a great thing for the BHF and will find it to be very rewarding. I will definitely be signing up again in 2019!
We promoted the campaign internally using our intranet, hosted on O365, and Yammer. We had great responses and had so much fun looking through all the pictures shared from it.
We also awarded all our ‘elves’ with badges of honour to thank them for their contribution and for them to proudly share their volunteering experience.
We surveyed everyone who took part and were thrilled to get a 4.4 out of 5 rating for the overall experience. Some of the anecdotal feedback was really heart-warming too:
We plan to continue promoting volunteering internally throughout the year , with London to Brighton in the summer promising to be a great day out!