Animal Welfare Professionals

Hello friends!

We're starting to plan our volunteer recognitions/appreciations for Volunteer Week in April.  All my ideas are tired, truthfully.  As a small, all volunteer organization, our volunteers are everything to us and we want them to know it. I'd love to hear what you're planning this year!

#PeopleManagement(includingVolunteerIntegration)

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Diane Metz
Volunteer
Orange Street Cats, Inc.
NY
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Hello! Small tip from me. So for Volunteer Week, consider a personalized "Volunteer Spotlight" featuring stories or achievements, a virtual social event, or a heartfelt video message expressing gratitude. Sometimes simple, genuine gestures leave the most lasting impression. Cheers to your amazing volunteers!

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Anna Watts
UI/UX designer
TeamLab
LA
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One of the Lost Pets facebook pages highlights a volunteer eac month...it's a really nice tribute...probably more meaningful than a small gift, tshirt, etc

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Amy Shever
(Volunteer) Executive Director
2nd Chance 4 Pets
CA
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This was a question from an Utah organization over the holidays wanting to do something for their volunteers. I suggested giving them coffee from a local coffee house that donates back to dog rescue. It's called Hugo Coffee and has a cute dog graphic on the bags. It was great for tired fosters and for local business. If you don't have that kind of budget we have gathered donations of bath bombs (my husband even loves them), candles and so on and handed those out. Another fun idea was going to a volunteers house with a large kitchen and making dog treats. It was a lot of fun and we really got to know each other. 

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Stephanie Smith
Foster
Rescue Rovers Dog Adoptions
UT
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This may or may not be helpful but we did something a while back where we named a bunch of new cats after our volunteers and gave them bios that matched up with them on Petfinder and our volunteers and staff had a blast with it. The cats got adopted really quickly with the silly bios and human names. It was an all-around good time!

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Hannah Soboleski
Executive Director
Binx's Home for Black Cats
Asheville, NC
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We are planning to do the same thing we have done for years now...but volunteers seem to love it. We set up our kitchen area with a different "food bar" each day (Mon-Fri). We've done a popcorn bar, breakfast bar, coffee, and donut bar, etc. Food seems to be the way into our volunteer's hearts :) We send out daily emails with the food bar photo of the day and invite all volunteers, regardless of the time given or when they were in last, to come have a snack on us. 

We also have our staff write individual thank you cards to our volunteers and we put those up on a bulletin board for volunteers to read. 

I attached a photo of one of our food bars.

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Erin Ellis
Community Engagement Director
Humane Society of Truckee-Tahoe

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Foster Program & Volunteer Management Specialist
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I would love ideas as well - but we are in a unique situation.  We started our animal welfare group in January 2024.  Right now the two main volunteers are me and our non-profit's co-founder.  Seems ODD to promote ourselves.  I think instead we may put something up for looking for volunteers.  BTW - here are the dates -April  21  to  27,  2024National Volunteer Week: April 21-27, 2024 National Volunteer Week: April 21-27, 2024National Volunteer Week: April 21-27, 2024National Volunteer Week: April 21-27, 2024

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Karen Kirsch
Founder
Spayed and Aid
KY
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