We know our volunteers make great use of MS Society information resources to support people with MS and their families, health and social care professionals.
We want to update you on how our information is changing and why. And also to let you know how we’ll keep you better informed of updates.
New formats and old
Our information now comes in many shapes and sizes – printed booklets, web pages, factsheets to download, online videos, animations and e-learning.
Our Volunteer Voice sessions are your chance to join a virtual get together of senior leaders and fellow volunteers to hear updates from across the organisation, and to raise questions and issues that are important to you.
As well as hearing from Nick Moberly, our Chief Executive Officer, each session has a theme based on updates or projects which may be of interest to volunteers. After this 15-minute segment, the rest of the session is dedicated to discussion and responding to questions or queries. You can ask questions in advance, or bring them up on the day.
In an email at the end of January, we were delighted to share the work we’ve been doing to develop our Volunteer Recognition Scheme - a fresh new way to acknowledge commitment, achievement and success. We outlined the principles of the scheme, and the key elements to look out for. If you missed it, you can read about this here.
MS Awareness Week 2022 will run from Monday 25 April to Sunday 1 May. It’s a really important time for us to come together, speak out and raise awareness of MS –both in the media and amongst the community. MS Awareness Week is run by the MS Society. Other MS charities (like MS Trust) may run their own campaigns, but they’ll raise awareness during the same week.
The Volunteering Team are holding a virtual event to welcome and induct volunteers into the MS Society. The event will last 2.5 hours and we’ll be covering:
We’re really looking forward to sharing our ambitious plans for Community Networks over the next five years with you.
We want to develop a strong, vibrant, diverse, and connected network of communities supporting people to live well with MS. We hope you can join one of our Zoom sessions to hear about how we’d like to achieve this, together.
Head of Community Networks, David Light, will be leading the session and will be giving an overview of our plans to create:
Our 2022 Annual Lecture will take place on Wednesday 8 June at 7.15pm at the Royal College of Physicians in London. It's a key feature of the Stop MS Appeal, giving donors and supporters the chance to hear about the latest in MS research from eminent scientists.
It’s a legal requirement for all charities to have consent to contact their supporters about their activities by email, and we invite supporters to renew this consent every three years.
Therefore, under e-privacy regulations, once a person’s opt-in to receive emails from us has expired, we have to remove their email data from our databases.
What will the process be?
In the next few weeks, we'll be getting in touch with our group members listed on the Portal to ask them for their consent to be contacted by email.
We’re delighted that more and more groups now feel able to resume the social gatherings which are such a lifeline to our service users. We know that a key element of these events can be offering refreshments to those who attend. But it’s important to clarify that group volunteers should not be preparing food.
This was our policy before any COVID-19 restrictions, and will remain so.
Every day, people fall prey to malicious emails and hacking scams. Data theft and online crime in the UK has increased by 47% since the beginning of the pandemic. Cyber-criminals are becoming more sophisticated and a password alone is no longer enough to keep information safe.
We therefore need to take action now to protect against personal information being stolen from our systems. Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) adds a second layer of security to online accounts because it relies on two forms of authentication:
