Vodafone blog

G’day, I’m Bruce and my Vodafone Foundation World of Difference (WOD) year for Radio Lollipop has started with a hiss and a roar!

I arrived at the Vodafone Foundation welcome workshop all fired-up and fresh from our annual Radio lollipop conference in Perth.

All of us Radio Lollipop volunteers always leave our annual conference with a newfound zeal and a whole lot of new skills we have learned.

However, my learning and enthusiasm was doubled after just two days with the Vodafone Foundation World of Difference team! I was literally jumping out of my skin to get going… So I did.

My WORLD OF DIFFERENCE year goal is to raise $1million to ensure five Radio Lollipop locations successfully move to our five new host hospitals being built in Queensland and Western Australia. $500,000 is to be raised in Qld and $500,000 in WA. It is a big challenge and one that needs to be tackled as professionally as possible.

My first round of meetings was a real luxury for me – I conducted them in ‘normal‘ business hours! This is such a bonus for the charity after many years of squeezing in early morning, lunch-time and late evening meetings to fit around my ‘normal‘ business life.

That is what you do as a volunteer. Being able to meet people in business hours, in a business-like manner puts a more professional aura around our work. I have discovered this is a major benefit and in the past weeks we have reaped the rewards.

As a direct result we have now completed a major agreement with an anonymous donor. This simply would not have happened had we not been able to be ‘business-like’.

A second very exciting development was the successful meeting with the combined management of the seven Brisbane Commercial Radio Stations who have all agreed to help create and participate in our major fund-raising event next year.

One of my KPI’s for this quarter is to identify and appoint influential people to form a Radio Lollipop Advisory Group in each market (Brisbane, Gold Coast and Perth).

Their task is to work with me to develop fund raising strategies, harness their local resources and steer their fund raising efforts for the various hospital moves.

In this first month the Brisbane Group have successfully completed a major presentation, I have identified the nucleus of the Perth group (and received their agreement) and am working on the Gold Coast Group.

We have also created a number of parallel fund-raising concepts and started work on one, and are developing the other. It is amazing what can be done when you spend quality time at it!

An unexpected and welcome bonus has been the ability to explore potential co-operative work with one of last years’ WORLD OF DIFFERENCE participants, Rebecca Ho of the Touched by Olivia Foundation.

They design and install special playground equipment that may be ideal for some of our upcoming hospital re-builds. It’s early days yet, but we are exploring the possibilities together.

I am off to Melbourne next week for a chat with a hospital there about introducing Radio lollipop. This is yet another benefit of being able to devote quality time to help Radio Lollipop help sick children in hospital.

As you may have guessed, I am very excited by the year ahead and confident we can achieve our challenging goals.

> Visit Vodafone Foundation for more on our World of Difference program