What challenge inspired this recipe?
This best practice came out from the personal project of an ESC volunteer hosted prior to COVID. The idea was to contact and ask each hosting organizations about the activities they have and to which volunteers doing their project somewhere else could attend. The objective was to allow volunteers to discover other projects and create links outside of their own hosting organization.
Over time, this personal project passed from a volunteer to another, evolved, and became the “events” part of the ESCBuddy app that we know today.
This “events” part now contains different types of event:
– The compulsory events, such as the on arrival and mid term seminar;
– The events proposed by the hosting organisations;
– The events proposed by the lead organizations;
– Local events proposed by volunteers or by CBB staff
Ingredients :
ESC Buddy App
Step by step guide
There are different ways of gathering the information:
– The hosting organisations contact us spontaneously;
– The volunteers active in these hosting organisations contact us spontaneously;
– CBB staff involved in the area communicate about the interesting events hap-pening;
– CBB staff volunteer the activities taking place in CBB itself
All this information is centralized by one person in charge of putting them on the app.
They have to be provided with enough details for the description to actually make sense:
The title of the event;
The dates;
The location;
A short description;
Whether the event is compulsory or not for the volunteers;
A contact person the volunteers can contact in case they have questions about it;
To which volunteers the event is addressed (for example, it can be an event for every-one, or only for those at the beginning of their project);
A picture (optional)
Important to highlight!This event section is being up-scaled as we speak, as there is now a chat automatically created along each event, which allows the volunteers to exchange about it and organize themselves to go together |
Before you start cooking, keep in mind…
This practice requires that the volunteers and hosting organisations get used to spontaneously provide the information. It took some time before we arrived to this state. A good way to gather these events and get the volunteers used to communicate it is to organize one session only about these events during any gathering or training you might have with them.
They first have to write down the events taking place in their organization, then take some time to explore different websites compiling events taking place in the region they volunteer in. This information is fed to ESC Buddy after the gathering and is a good starting basis.
