I've been volunteering with the National Building Museum for years and they
have each Jan. a volunteer appreciation dinner. The volunteer supervisors do
a speech and a funny slide show and then there's a catered dinner in the
Great Hall and the entire staff each brings in a desert. It's a great event.
They give prizes to the volunteers with the most hours, something
personalized from the gift shop, and the rest of us were given these tiny
pewter pins showing the Great Hall at the end of our first year. Now each
year we get a number which hangs from the pin and shows our total number of
years.

The Museum also has an Volunteer Advisory Board, which meets monthly to
sprout off our opinions on all things museum related. They used to give us a
small Christmas gift like a mug or t-shirt or something like that from the
shop. Several years ago we stopped and instead the money that would have
gone to the gift we use to pick out books to donate to the Volunteer
Library- which gives all the volunteers a little something to enjoy, but
also enrich their tours and knowledge.

If you want to look into a great volunteer program, do check out the
Building Museum's (Michael Kruelle is in charge). I have volunteered and
worked with alot of museums and this one is easily the best run and has the
happiest volunteers.

We do nothing for our volunteers here at my museum- we're a prime example of
a volunteer program that was let go for too many decades and there's a bunch
of ancient rogue volunteers running around. I'm just trying to get the
asylum back from the inmates.



Pamela Feltus
Curator
National Museum of American Jewish Military History
1811 R Street NW, Washington DC 20009
202-265-6280 x201

www.nmajmh.org






> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jill P. Dixon [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2001 9:08 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [Re: volunteer appreciation gifts]
>
>
> Trish is right! One thing here is that after a certain number
> of hours, they get a "plastic" name tag w/name engraved & our
> logo. (I should mention that we just have those plastic
> holder nametags w/paper for our student workers, community
> service 'volunteers' and students who are
> volunteering for a class - these are our 'transients' and are
> not expected to stay long enough to justify a permanent badge).
>
> We give away other volunteer pins (those hearts? or that say
> "I volunteer" at other stages). When we got to people with
> 1500 hours, we decided on a nice gold/brass engraved tag and
> the people who got those are so proud of them - it's
> encouraged those that were close to that 1500
> amount to put in extra time because they badly want the "1500
> Hour Volunteer" pins! At 1000 hours, we put up a wall plaque
> behind the desk with people's names and the month & year they
> accomplished that. As more get to that 1000 mark, their names
> are added to the plaque.
>
> This year, we've also decided to recognize people for their
> length of service so in addition to "hours served"
> milestones, "years served" will get something. We usually
> spend about $300 on our recognition party (on gifts, food,
> transportation/tickets to our event if we go off
> site).
>
> Also, this year as our volunteers are putting in more & more
> hours and we have to continue thinking up new "milestone"
> gifts, we are adding "logo" items. We will be doing
> embroidered shirts w/our logo on them. They will cost us
> about $25 per shirt but considering the amount of time
> that people give, it seems like they deserve much more!
>
> Jill Dixon
> SMC Museum
>
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