Managing Coronavirus Vaccine Volunteers

By

On 20th January 2021

In COVID-19

Three types of coronavirus vaccine (Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Moderna), have been approved in the UK for use on the NHS.

So far, over 3,639,309 people have been vaccinated in the UK. Additionally to this, the government have planned to have every over 18 UK citizen vaccinated by this Autumn. But until then, the government plan to have 15 million vulnerable people vaccinated by mid February. And in November it was realised the NHS would need 30,000 volunteers to help deliver the programme.

After speaking to our clients, it came to our attention that many will be simply using spreadsheets to managing their volunteers for the coronavirus vaccine, unaware of the software they could be using to help. This is where TeamKinetic can help. We offer an easy to use online system that makes managing your volunteers safe and easier.

How can we help? 

Saving Time…

When using spreadsheets to find volunteers and their contact information, it can take a lot of scrolling….and time. With TeamKinetic, it couldn’t be simpler. Our system allows you to search for a volunteer and find all their information in just a few clicks. Easy right? You can even email or text them or even set up rotas straight from the app; saving you time.

Easy Access…

Volunteers have access to their own profile in your TeamKinetic powered app. Self-service means less work for you, so if they forget any details about where they need to be and what time, they can simply log in to their profile and everything will be there with easy access. This all supported by automatic reminders about their shifts or any other requirements you may have. Saving you loads of time to support those who need a little more help.

Safety First…

Best yet, TeamKinetic is fully protected and encrypted with the most up to date security. We adhere to all GDPR regulations so you don’t need to worry about it.  Excel Spreadsheets are unsafe and are easily deleted and corrupted, what happens if your data is then stolen? TeamKinetic ensures your personal data is safe and secure and meets all legal requirements.

Hear It From Someone Else…

We recently spoke to one of our clients, Claire from Halton & St Helens Volunteer Centre. We spoke to Claire about how TeamKinetic has helped them since the start of the pandemic, to managing volunteers at their vaccination centre at St Helen’s Ruby Stadium. Here’s what she had to say about our recruitment process and communication tools…

‘I have found that the TeamKinetic support they give and app they have built to be the best way to recruit our pandemic volunteers. Since the covid-19 pandemic, it’s been a godsend really. We have noticed that other organisations have not had the ability to recruit like we can, as quickly and safely, as they don’t have this kind of support.

We have had 1500 volunteers register since the beginning of the pandemic as it is easy to get volunteers to register.

The way that TeamKinetic excels for me is the communication tools, the ability to get in touch with volunteers very quickly. We are an avid user of the community task dashboard, our volunteers very quickly pick up tasks on there, and they can chat to one another on there. So being able to text them or email them as a group or a specific cohort of volunteers is really important for us, and helps us to manage the way, when and who gets involved.

When we knew we had to ramp up for the Vaccine, it was straightforward to promote, recruit, track training and deploy the volunteers as all the volunteers and the managment tools were right there in the app’

The Community Action Network that covers Bournemouth, Dorset and Pool, started using TeamKinetic in the break between Christmas and New Year and went live with over 1200 volunteers on the 7th of January. TeamKinetic have specialised in rapid deployment so you can get on with focusing on the important job of getting people vaccinated.

Join The TeamKinetic Family Today…

To find out more about TeamKinetic, feel free to call us on 0161 914 5757 or email our Director of Sales at chris@teamkinetic.co.uk. 

Alternatively, take a look at our website to find out more and start your FREE trial today! Or, read through our social media pages for more tips and tricks – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube. 

We hope you enjoy our system!

 

Lockdown 3.0 – How To Volunteer Safely

By

On 15th January 2021

In News & Views

Lockdown 3.0 is here in the UK and we are bringing to you the guidelines given by each government in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland on how to volunteer safely. Below are each government and links to guidance on how to volunteer during this lockdown… Keep reading and stay safe!

England

A ‘reasonable excuse’ for leaving your home includes volunteering – you can also leave home to provide voluntary or charitable services, where it cannot be done from home. For further guidance, see below: 

Scotland

Examples of reasonable excuses to go out include to provide voluntary or charitable services, but only where that cannot be done from your home. For further guidance, see below:

Wales

The new rules allow volunteers to go out to provide care or help to a vulnerable person, including emergency help. This includes getting food and medicines for them. For further guidance, see below: 

Northern Ireland 

Where possible, you should volunteer from home. If you cannot do so, you can volunteer outside your home, if you are able to meet the regulations and guidelines applicable at that time. For further guidance, see below: 

2021 Resolutions – What Happens Next?

By

On 13th January 2021

In News & Views

I think everyone would agree that 2020 was a bit of a rubbish year. Between the pandemic, Brexit and Trump we saw some of the very best and worst of human nature play out in front of our eyes. As we head into 2021, we at TeamKinetic think we can make the world a slightly better place to be. As part of our first meeting back as a team, we discussed what our hopes for 2021 look like and our resolutions to help us get there.  We thought it might be nice to share these with the internet and challenge you to come up with your own resolutions to share with us.

Personal Resolutions

Here’s what the team are thinking about for 2021:

Company Resolutions

As a company we have set ourselves some resolutions and goals as we look to come out of the pandemic stronger. We want to share these with our customers, so you can hold us to account if you think we are coming up short.

TeamKinetic will be investing time on our UX/UI across our product as we look to standardise and modernise the interface.  We’ll be giving special attention to mobile and small-screen usage as we think this will be the number one way volunteers interact with our services in 2021.

We have plans to improve how opportunities can be created with a new approach based around the creation of ‘roles’.  This is a really big change for TeamKinetic so you are likely to see this feature set develop over the next 12 months. We’re excited for you to see what we have in mind with this.

We are looking at DBS/ PVG and other forms of ID verification that can be undertaken directly in your TeamKinetic application.  We want to reduce your administrative burden and save you money on the cost of administering criminal record checks.

This year we want to build on our customer steering group with more interaction and feedback from you, our customers.  We will be launching our customer attitudes and satisfaction survey which we hope you will get involved with.  We are developing new tools that will help us understand how you use TeamKinetic. Also, we’re launching our supplementary training that you can access to improve what you get out of TeamKinetic.

Last year saw some huge new features added to TeamKinetic. We will be continuing to refine and explore where these go next. We hope you will be with us to share your thoughts and opinions on what we do.

Here’s to 2021.

You can find TeamKinetic on social media and listen to our podcast:

Twitter       Facebook       LinkedIn       YouTube       Instagram       Podcast

 

Have you enjoyed using TeamKinetic? If you could leave us a review on Capterra, we’d really appreciate it! We’ll even send you a little thank you.

Lockdown 3.0 Volunteering Guidelines

By

On 11th January 2021

In News & Views

Another day, another lockdown. Lockdown 3.0 is upon us and we know the volunteering world are just waiting to read about the new guidelines from the government. We have found some useful information in regards to volunteering during this lockdown. Each is relevant per country…
 
As this is a fast changing situation, please make sure you are checking for latest guidance from your national government and/ or infrastructure body.

England

A ‘reasonable excuse’ for leaving your home includes volunteering – you can also leave home to provide voluntary or charitable services, where it cannot be done from home. For further guidance, see below: 

Scotland

Examples of reasonable excuses to go out include to provide voluntary or charitable services, but only where that cannot be done from your home. For further guidance, see below: 

Wales

Tthe new rules allow volunteers to go out to provide care or help to a vulnerable person, including emergency help. This includes getting food and medicines for them. For further guidance, see below: 
 

Northern Ireland

Where possible, you should volunteer from home. If you cannot do so, you can volunteer outside your home, if you are able to meet the regulations and guidelines applicable at that time. For further guidance, see below: 
 

4 Ways TeamKinetic Can Help YOU Incentivise Volunteers

By

On 7th December 2020

In TeamKinetic Features

Retaining and recruiting volunteers can be a difficult task. With volunteering in high demand incentivising your volunteers may be the way forward to ensure retainment. Now, you may ask… “Incentivising volunteers! How can I do that?” Keep reading, TeamKinetic may just have the answer you are looking for…

1. Logging Hours/Leaving Feedback

Your volunteers give up their own time to help your organisation. So giving them some feedback even after they have volunteered will show how much you value them and will mean more to them than you may think! 

TeamKinetic allows you to leave feedback when logging a volunteer’s hours. If you forget or don’t have time to personally thank your volunteer at the end of their session, this section gives you the chance to do so. It also let’s the volunteer log their own hours and leave feedback about the opportunity they joined. As someone who has volunteered in the past, receiving feedback from anyone at the organisation is such a great feeling and has pushed me to come and volunteer again. This could be your volunteers.

2. Achievement Badges

This incentive is a great way to push your volunteers to log more hours. Once a volunteer logs their hours, they will add together to create their total volunteer hours. A small way to help increase volunteer hours is to have achievement badges when they reach certain hour milestones.

TeamKinetic has achievement badges automatically on their system. So, for example, if volunteers were to reach 10 hours combined they would get the badge ‘Super Member’, at 50 hours  they could get the badge ‘Dedicated’ and so on. 

The achievement badge’s pictures and names can be customised by yourself. These badges are a great way to incentivise volunteers and get them to keep on volunteering so they can reach the next milestone.

3. Hour Trades

Wouldn’t it be great for volunteers to trade all of their logged hours for real life items!

Well, TeamKinetic has just the thing. Hour Trades. Your volunteers can use their logged hours to trade them in for things such as vouchers, T-shirts, hats, entry to museum/art galleries, sporting activities… Whatever items you feel fit. This type of reward recognises a volunteers contributions and can push them to want to volunteer more.

4. Custom Award Badges

Have you ever thought about starting a ‘volunteer of the month’ award? To give your volunteers an extra incentive to volunteer more or make them feel appreciated? Yes? Keep reading, you may like what you see…

TeamKinetic allows you to create custom award badges for your volunteers. These could be ‘volunteer of the month’ or ‘volunteer of the year’. They can be absolutely anything you want and look however you want, with the fully customisable option! Once you have assigned the award to a volunteer, they will receive an email with the award in it to congratulate them. Again, this recognises the efforts your volunteers put in, helping you to retain more volunteers and hopefully gain more.

Start Incentivising Today

If these incentives have drawn you in and you want to find out more, you can watch the video below where we go through the system to show you each incentive.

Even more intrigued, head over to our website and start your FREE 30 day trial today to explore the whole of TeamKinetic! Be sure to also visit our social media pages to find out more information about TeamKinetic Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and YouTube. 

You can also give us a call on 0161 9145757 and we would be happy to talk with you about our system. 

We hope to speak to you soon, Stay Safe!

Training Module: Using TeamKinetic to manage your volunteer programme.

By

On 20th November 2020

In TeamKinetic Features, Training

An exciting, in-depth look at how to use TeamKinetic on a day-to-day basis to run your volunteer programme. Partly hands-on, your tutor will talk you through setting up opportunities and allow you to see the system from different users perspectives. At the end of this training session, you will have a good understanding of how each user interacts with the system and how to communicate and manage your volunteers and service providers.

Who Should Attend?

Either new employees who have taken over the role of administrator OR existing administrators who would like a refresher of all the main functionality.

What does it cover?

Volunteer Life Cycle

A practical session where attendees will experience the system from each users perspective covering the following:

  • Registering as a provider
  • [As a provider/admin] Creating an opportunity
  • Registering as a volunteer
  • [As a volunteer] Joining the opportunity
  • [As a provider/admin] Managing and communicating with volunteers on the opportunity

Managing Volunteers

  • Searching for volunteer/s
  • Search filters explained
  • Adding volunteers without an email address
  • Inviting volunteers onto the system
  • Criminal checks
  • Volunteer groups
  • Meetings and Inductions

Recognition and Rewards

  • Achievement badges
  • OpenBadges
  • HourTrades

Managing Opportunities

  • standardising activity tags
  • Shared opportunities
  • References
  • Events
  • Accreditation badges

Reporting and Insight

  • Reporting library explained
  • Exporting information

Effective Communication

  • Notifications
  • Volunteer news
  • Sending volunteers an email or text
  • Volunteer/Provider bulk emails

How to get Help

  • Support tickets
  • Contextual help

Questions and Workshops

Any questions will be answered and workshopped in the final segment, helping you to apply what you have learnt to your own unique programme.

How do I sign up?

You can access this training from your HELP > EXTRA TRAINING menu. Purchase the number of credits you need and then click on the BOOK button and select your course and dates.

You can check the latest training dates from within your system. Just go to ‘Help & Support’ → ‘Extra Training’

TeamKinetic – Interim release 1.3.3

By

On 12th November 2020

In TeamKinetic Features, Technical Updates

It has been a busy few months at TeamKinetic during the Covid 19 summer, but we’ve still been updating and fixing TeamKinetic regularly. What we haven’t been doing well is letting you all know about the changes, apologies.

We have now pushed through our last interim updates and fixes before our next major release in Q1/2 2021. TeamKinetic is up to version 1.3.3!

Here is what is new.

New Opportunity Details Layout

We’ve, hopefully, improved the layout of the opportunity details or more info page. Peoples monitors are getting larger with a higher resolution, so we have adjusted the layout to a two column view.

On mobile or small screens this reverts to a single column display.

External opportunities

When adding a quick opportunity (super admins can enable quick opportunities for their providers from the settings area), you have an extra option to mark the opportunity as external. When selected the user enters what external organisation is responsible for the opportunity, the web address for more information/application, and the advertising end date. 
 
When a volunteer views the opportunity they are informed its an external opportunity, and are redirected via an apply button to the organisations own website.

Secret Opportunities

These are not clandestine opportunities for secret agents, but a way to hide open opportunities from search results and opportunity suggestions throughout the application.

Volunteers with the exact link will be able to view and join the opportunity as normal, but those without access to the link will not find the opportunity.

In all other regards the opportunity behaves just like a regular opportunity.

Add Volunteer Meetings in Bulk

You can now create and add volunteers to meeting dates directly from the bulk actions on the volunteer search page. So you can add 10 or 20 volunteers to a group meeting very easily.

We’ve also updated the text a little to make it clear that you can enter a zoom/meet link in the location field if your meeting is going to be virtual.

Private Notes for External Volunteers

You can now add private notes to external volunteer profiles. These private notes are not viewable by the administrators of the volunteers home application.

New Volunteer Search Filters

You can find two new filters in the TYPE area for a volunteers disability and special needs status.

Completed Community Task Report

We are still working on getting some more insightful reporting around community tasks in the next major version.

In the meantime, you can download a complete list of all completed tasks from the community task page. It includes dates, times and which volunteer that completed the task.

You’ll find the download button at the top of the completed task column.

Healthcheck Status Included in Member Downloads

This is an update for the accredit module in TeamKinetic (interested in managing events and printing access badges straight from TeamKinetic? Get in touch).

When you export event member details the export now includes their latest healthcheck status.

POD Report

We’ve included a small POD report in the main reporting area which tells you how many admins, providers, opportunities, volunteers, and hours are in each pod.

We will be adding some more detail in the next major release.

Public Roadmap Accepting Votes

You can now access our public roadmap straight from the help menu, read up on what features might be heading down the road and also importantly, vote on the features you would most like to see.

We will be keeping an eye on the votes and endeavouring to push the most popular features to the front of the release queue, so get voting.

New Help Videos

We have added a tonne of new help videos to the Tutorial Videos section in the your help menu.

They are super short informative videos about specific features or processes and well worth a look.

Increased Maximum Image Size

The maximum width of images for provider and event profiles is now 1900 pixels, so the quality of the image on large displays is now a lot better.

We have also adjusted some of the image processing to improve the size/quality performance.

Facebook Live 

Please join us for our Facebook Live on Friday 13th at 2pm on our Facebook TeamKinetic Customer Group to see these new updates in action. Make sure you are a member of this group before 2pm tomorrow to make sure you can watch the live! Just click here to go to the group. 

A Spooky Competition

By

On 12th October 2020

In Halloween

Who doesn’t love a good competition? We certainly do!

With COVID-19 still looming, we are determined to help companies boost staff and volunteer morale with a little help from the spooky season. That is why we have created a list of 7 different ways you can lift the (spooky) spirits of those you work with. And, we are want YOU to send pictures in of your organisation getting involved with any of the 7 ideas below; the most creative one wins our ‘trick or treat’ prize. But, you only have until the 1st of November to send your creative pictures in.

 

1. Get Creative

Whether you are working from home, or still in the office, that doesn’t mean you can’t get creative for Halloween. Why don’t you decorate your desk (or work from home space) with some spooky decorations? This is a cheap and fun way to ensure you can still make the most of the haunting holiday, despite COVID-19 restrictions. You can even make it a friendly competition and reward the person with the spookiest desk!

2. Get Fancy…Dressed

Whether you are still in the office, working from home, or volunteering, you can still make a show-stopping appearance in some fancy dress this Halloween! You could even do spooky make-up too. 

We are currently working from home, but I know I will still be dressing up this Halloween. Why don’t you get speaking to your volunteers and employees to encourage them to take part in some fancy dress this year? You can even make it another Halloween competition. Have a look at some popular inspiration below.

  • Velma and Daphne from Scooby Doo
  • The Purge make-up
  • Cobweb make-up
  • Mary Poppins and The Chimney Sweep
  • Breaking Bad

3. Low-key spookiness

Fancy dress and make-up not your thing? Don’t worry. You could simply wear some spooky socks, a terrifying tie, a Halloween headband, or a scary scrunchie. And if you’re working from home, you can even just wear some Halloween pyjamas at your desk, whatever gets you in the  positive spooky spirit while COVID-19 is about.

  • Terrifying Tie
  • Halloween Headband
  • Scary Scrunchies
  • Spooky Socks

4. Carving Out Spooky Competition

One thing that screams Halloween fun to me is pumpkin carving. Mine is currently on the table staring at me as I type this, ready to be carved along to a spooky film. Even with COVID-19 still lurking about, this is still something you can get your staff and volunteers involved in. You can make it a fun competition over a Zoom call, perfect for keeping things COVID-19 safe whilst also boosting morale.

5. Ghoulish Games

Did somebody say…quiz?! If there is one thing we love at TeamKinetic, that is a good quiz. Especially one that fits in with the festive holidays. This is another idea you can use to boost the morale of your staff and volunteers. You could arrange a Halloween quiz over a Zoom call and do your quiz over a PowerPoint presentation? 

6. Bewitching Baking

With COVID-19, actual baking may not be possible. But, that doesn’t mean you can’t purchase some spooky cakes to give out to your volunteers and staff. This is a perfect way to encourage some spooky spirit in a minimalistic way. These could be cakes, biscuits, chocolate apples, you name it! In fact, take a look at a few of your options in supermarkets now.

  • Spooky Mummy Marshmallow Lolly- Tesco
  • Spooky Muffins- Tesco
  • Freaky Fondant Cakes- Sainsbury’s
  • Deadly Cupcakes- Sainsbury’s
  • Cadbury’s Pumpkin Patch Cakes- Sainsbury’s

7. Spoooky Social Media

Holidays such as Halloween acts as the perfect opportunity to put your company in the spotlight for getting involved in festivities through social media. You could redesign your logo and header picture for October? We use Canva to make our profile look spooky; take a look at what we have done below and it may spike you with some spooky inspiration.

TeamKinetic Twitter- @TeamKineticUK

Inspiring Each Other

Everything is uncertain right now, with a lot of things being cancelled and many of us beginning to work from home again. But, that doesn’t mean we can’t all inspire each other to still enjoy the upcoming holidays. Share these ideas with your staff and your volunteers, send your pictures in before the 1st of November, and we can make sure we use Halloween to boost morale! And, one of you will be lucky enough to win our ‘trick or treat’ prize!

Send us your pictures through Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Or email them to us at chloe@teamkinetic.co.uk

Managing Micro Volunteering

By

On 12th October 2020

In COVID-19, News & Views, Volunteer Management

Micro-volunteering is the idea of volunteering in ‘short bursts’. This means volunteering in short and convenient ways, at times and places which suit everybody’s schedule. What makes micro-volunteering different from standard volunteering is that it can be done online or face-to-face, and doesn’t require any long term commitment. This means that the volunteer also doesn’t have to go through an application or training process first. Micro-volunteering is perfect for both volunteers and organisations! It has the potential to attract a wider diversity and greater number of people, including individuals who wouldn’t have got involved otherwise due to conflicting schedules. 

Examples of micro-volunteering include:

  • Delivering supplies to those isolating from covid-19
  • Signing online petitions
  • Writing blogs
  • Retweeting and posting relevant content to social media
  • Two minute litter pick
  • Buying a homeless person food or a hot drink
  • Researching and completing online surveys
  • Donate old clothes and goods to a charity shop

Remember this..?

Going Beyond the Ice Bucket Challenge | Ipsos

Remember when the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge went viral in the summer of 2014? Where everyone, including big celebrities like Mark Zuckerberg, would tip a bucket of ice water over their head to raise awareness of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS).

Well, this was a perfect example of micro-volunteering. While this wasn’t classified as your ‘typical’ volunteering, it engaged people all over the world and encouraged them to donate their time and resources into raising awareness of ALS. This viral challenge raised $116 million over two years from people engaging in this challenge who previously might not have got involved if it wasn’t for micro-volunteering.

How has COVID-19 impacted this?

The rates of micro-volunteering will have naturally increased from COVID-19. This comes from people having too much spare time and wanting to use their time to help others during such a negative time.

COVID-19 has made the majority of the population go into self isolation to protect themselves and to protect others. This then meant many volunteers had the suspend their volunteering duties- this is where micro-volunteering comes into play! Micro-volunteering has allowed volunteers to continue their contributions whilst isolating at home. For example, VolunteerScotland has seen 60,000 people come forward as a response to COVID-19, prepared to help in the most difficult of times- and this is just Scotland!

 

The future of micro-volunteering…

Micro-volunteering is only going to continue to grow, especially considering the current climate, and this is something we need to encourage. It’s simple, without micro-volunteering there would be less people volunteering their time- especially during COVID-19. 

One of the biggest barriers to volunteering is people not having the time. Work commitments is the biggest barrier at (49%), with people ‘doing other things with their spare time’ closely following (35%), and child commitments following at (23%). Micro- volunteering allows people to contribute to volunteering around their schedule. This can even be sharing something on social media to raise awareness.

With COVID-19 now also causing volunteering barriers, micro-volunteering has come to the rescue. Micro-volunteering has allowed volunteers who are self isolating to continue to contribute to a cause from the safety of their home. This could prove to be the future for many volunteers who may not feel safe to return to face-to-face volunteering for a while. This then allows organisations to continue to receive volunteer support, despite the current COVID-19 situation.

How can you encourage micro volunteering with TeamKinetic?

During the peak of the COVID pandemic, we added an entirely new feature set around micro community volunteering. It includes a new admin and provider management page. Your volunteers also have access to their own progressive web app, allowing them to join micro volunteering tasks and record their progress using their phone.

Step 1 – Enable the community tasks feature from your super admin options menu

As you can see above, there are a few options available. Remember to give access to your volunteers and allow them to download the web app in order to access your community tasks.

Step 2 – Add your community tasks

Select ‘Community Tasks’ from the ‘Opportunities & Providers’ menu. Once you have enabled them in the super admin options menu.

Hit the big GREEN plus button to add your first community task.

There are some important things to know when adding your community tasks;

  1. All the data you add in the red section is visible publicly to your volunteers.
  2. The first set of data in the yellow section headed ‘Private Data’ is never revealed to volunteers.
  3. The second set of data in the yellow section headed ‘Data Shown to Assigned Volunteers’ is only revealed to the volunteer that applies and is accepted for the task.

You can describe the task here and provide a location for the recipient. This is as well as restricting which volunteers have access to see and pick up these tasks. You can restrict by their ID check, criminal check status, and whether they are linked to the assigned provider or not.

All your volunteers that have logged into the web app will receive notifications when new tasks are added. This will either be in the app for Android/Chrome devices or via email for iOS devices.

Step 3 – Get your volunteers completing the tasks

By enabling access to volunteers in the super admin options menu, your volunteers can login at ICanHelp.teamkinetic.co.uk. Additionally, by switching on the relevant options, you can also select to advertise the web app to your volunteers when they login on their dashboard.

When they login they will see a familiar mobile app interface and can search and select community tasks and apply to join.

Once they have applied you will see their application in your admin community tasks management page. From there you can assign them to the task. The volunteer will receive a notification that they have been assigned a task and can then view the full details in the app. Once they have completed the task, the volunteer can then update the status within the app.

It’s a super easy and fast way to encourage participation with those small micro-volunteering activities in your community. This will also help to build lasting connections.

Don’t hesitate to get in touch or open a support ticket if you need more help setting up your community tasks. You can chat to us through our website or directly email us at chris@teamkinetic.co.uk.

 

Macmillan at the Highest Peak in the UK

By

On 5th October 2020

In Charity

Our Macmillan fundraising trip to the highest peak in the UK, Ben Nevis, was meant for a balmy May day  in 2020. COVID put a stop to that, and after numerous false starts the date turned out to be a potentially chilly and wet late September 2020. As it happened the weather gods were fantastically generous and gave us a crystal clear, dry, and windless day. Our guide reckoned you only got 10-15 days like that a year.

Our group of 23 was split into rule of 6 compatible mini groups.We then hit the trail at a frosty 8am, with our groups starting at staggered times for COVID safety. 

The trial is easy to follow and very well maintained. If you are thinking of doing it, don’t be put off by the height, its a moderate gradient all the way up but steady with no scrambling or climbing. We took 3 hours to get to the top at an easy pace for us. If you go in the summer and start early, you’ll have 10 hours of good light to reach the summit and return. If in doubt hire a guide who can make the decisions about weather and timings for you.

The trail starts at the visitor centre, crosses the river, passes an excellent pub and hostel and quickly starts to climb. After 90 minutes or so we got to Lochan Meall, the halfway point!

Lochan Meall – halfway

From the lake there are a series of switchbacks, the guide called them the Christmas Tree, and then a short steep section till you reach the summit plateau. And then the top!

At the top

It was a great feeling to get to the top and we felt so lucky and privileged to have such a clear and glorious day to look out from 1,345 meters across the Nevis Range and the Western Highlands.

We felt lucky and glad to be alive. Don’t take it for granted, cancer hits every family and everyone has their own story. On the way home we learnt that a friend had been diagnosed with terminal cancer; young, fit, new family and wife, a tragedy. It was an honour to raise a little over £7,000 for Macmillan who every day helps that family and that friend get the most from the time they have.

This was an amazing experience, and raising money for a charity like Macmillan only made it better.

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