Australian Volunteers
Stories for Home
400% increase in engagement with Instagram and Facebook posts
International Volunteers Day 2020 content shared by 91% of overseas embassies
Tasked with training and placing Australian volunteers into roles throughout Asia-Pacific, The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and Australian Volunteers Program (AVP) needed a way to showcase the vital work that our international volunteers are doing overseas, both in terms of communicating program achievements, and attracting new volunteers.
Gathering engaging content from hundreds of volunteers based in 25+ countries throughout Asia-Pacific, with limited equipment and connectivity posed a significant challenge, so AVP partnered with Taste to equip volunteers to be able to tell their own stories.
“We have worked collaboratively with Taste for four years. In that time, the team at Taste have developed a deep understanding of our work and work hard to develop creative solutions to the unique communications challenges and opportunities facing our program.”
Melanie Wilson
Manager, Public Diplomacy; Australian Volunteers
We created ‘Stories for Home’; an engaging program to educate volunteers to become great storytellers while in-country, being mindful of the practical restrictions they face. For two years we have been setting bi-monthly ‘story briefs’ – creative communications tasks that offer training in skills such as photography principles, how to get the best from smartphone photography, and writing for social media.
The content that is submitted in response to the briefs, then becomes authentic and heartfelt showcase content for AVP’s social media channels.
Engagement with Stories for Home content received on average three times the amount of engagement as other AVP content, and is consistently the most engaged with content.
“Even though we’re all volunteers from Australia, we all have really unique experiences… I don’t think there are enough of us sharing these stories; and the more of us that do it, the better.”
Annamarie
Volunteer; Timor-Leste
Thank you
A special thank you to Mel, Claire, Jane and Vic for your passion to empower volunteers to tell their stories, to Dave, Micah and Alex for all of your expertise you brought to the project, and to all of our partner organisations and Australian volunteers for being so generous with your stories.