My Volunteer Experience - Waleed Sayeed

Our Volunteer Waleed - Personal Biography
Waleed is a former student at the University of Adelaide, who had commenced study in the Bachelor of Civil Engineering. He has also worked as a volunteer with Leep, now known as Digital Literacy Foundation, where he helped clients learn to use their technological devices. 

He joined Connecting Up on the 25 August 2021 and has volunteered regularly two mornings a week, completing more than 382 hours as at June 2023. His plan for volunteering has been to gain work experience and develop his work skills in order to boost his chances of obtaining paid work. His future career goals after that would be to look at possible areas of study that will lead him to more expansive work opportunities. 

Waleed is camera conscious however has given us permission to use his name and capture the photo above as well as many of the activities he has been involved in to help other volunteers, especially in seeing how his journey might help people to understand more about the types of projects available in SAcommunity. 

Total Hours 875 Hours This Year 315 Joined 25 August 2021 Last Check-in 11 December 2024

SAcommunity wanted to highlight our affection for 'the old guard' our experienced and established SAcommunity veterans. People who make up our core team, return regularly each week to volunteer and keep the service running. They assist in decision-making, idea development and implementation, check and create processes, and critically, help our new volunteers and interns find their feet. We felt we were more than overdue to introduce, acknowledge and thank some of our team members. 

Work Experience - SAcommunity Teams
Waleed has worked in a few different teams during his volunteering role at Connecting Up, the major ones being the Information Management and Customer Service Teams.

On the online SAcommunity directory, the data held in the listings for the organisations and services becomes outdated over time, and either the organisations/services may close down or new organisations/services may need to be entered as part of the community service information life-cycle. It is vital to ensure that the information held is as accurate and current as possible so that people can find the information they are looking for, and all organisations, even small but critical groups can be represented for e-campaigns, research and consultation.

~Customer Service Team
Since accuracy is key, the correct information must be sought from the correct sources so Waleed learnt about primary and secondary information sources and which are acceptable to use. If the information could not be found or more information was needed, he called the organisation by phone and contacted them by email.

He undertook training for this because it involves learning telephone techniques from more experienced volunteers such as David Webb and practising scripts with other volunteers such as Rex Porter, Flavia and Stathis Avramis. Waleed now in turn, is taking the lead himself to practice with the new interns and demonstrate these required skills.

Once he finally retrieves current and relevant information, he assesses this, edits it for comprehensiveness, then enters relevant data in a summarised form into the directory, in accordance with the style guide and community information cataloguing standards. 

Searching for, collecting, processing and preparing information in this way makes it easier for others to understand and obtain the assistance they need and Waleed has updated hundreds of records through his volunteer journey. 

~Information Management Team
Waleed has also worked on many large data entry projects where the organisation was large with multiple branches within Adelaide or South Australia. These projects known to be complex and expansive required planning and plenty of information management skills due to the sheer size of the project. Listings have to be made for the head office, branches and then the services the organisation offered, with hierachical linkages between each service record to improve the access points and information architecture.  

~Community Information Provision
One more role Waleed operates in as part of the customer service team is in handling assistance requests where emails are sent to Connecting Up asking for help and the customer needs to be directed to the right service or organisation. He had to use problem solving skills for difficult cases and learnt how valuable information could be to someone, as well as the importance of delivering 'the right information, to the right person, in the right way, at the right time'. Clear communication skills needed to be developed and used as well as the ability to interpret questions, locate information, and deliver accurate answers to assist people to find the information they need.

~Data Analytics Team
Another team Waleed has joined is the Data Analytics Team. This team provides service statistics reports for councils using Google Analytics and visualisation tech tools Power BI and Canva, to display community service information and demand in various councils. The reports enable councils to identify and prioritize the services and facilities that are most valuable to the local communities they serve.

"I have really enjoyed learning to use Google Analytics, Power BI and Canva. These tools certainly boosted my IT skills and refreshed my knowledge of using Microsoft Excel, which was key in transferring the data from Google Analytics to the Power BI and Canva reports I created and completed for the Municipal Council of Roxby Downs >>here. Since then I have been working through the council exports from Universal Google Analytics to capture the data for reporting before it disappears on the 1 July 2024 as a result of the change to Google Analytics 4 which was implemented in 2023."

~ Capacity Building Team
Capacity Building through peer-to-peer learning is encouraged across the Teams because all members have such as diverse range of knowledge, skills and experiences. Ideally, where possible, team members also develop learning materials for others to show them how to undertake some of the various tasks needed in the SAcommunity service.

"After completion of a few large projects, I created a Microsoft Visio document that would show new volunteers or the organisation offering the service, how to approach entering all of the data into the directory. I also learnt how to use Canva when preparing a report using the software as part of my work in the Data Analytics Team."  
 

Waleed as a now seasoned volunteer and core member of the SAcommunity Team, has assisted new volunteers and interns to settle into the workplace by welcoming them to the team, answering questions they might have had about volunteering at Connecting Up, and guiding them in their induction. Peer-to-peer training is effective, personalised, and makes the program more sustainable, particularly during busy periods when there are many new new interns starting and even more questions, particularly when the Community Information and Volunteer Coordinator is working with different members across the group.

He has helped the team learn telephone techniques by practising a telephone script with them, which involved one volunteer asking questions to retrieve the needed details to update an organisation in the directory, while the other volunteer would answer, as if he or she was an employee from that organisation. Afterwards, he provided feedback and constructive criticism as well as relate his own experiences of making calls as a Volunteer Information Officer in the Customer Service Team.   

Recently, Waleed created three supplementary training videos for the Data Analytics Team, by teaching himself to use TechSmith's Camtasia software suite for screen recording and editing. The resulting video tutorials captured critical processes needed in cleaning the data, correcting Power BI reports and Canva reports, providing online instructions for all new interns and volunteers.   

Volunteer Training and Development
Volunteers are provided with the opportunity to develop themselves and their own skills and gain work experience through the program, taking part in meetings, internal office and organisation-wide events and external stakeholder activities, as well as selecting relevant tech-based training webinars and workshops offered by Connecting Up in order to up-skill themselves. 

Professional Development - Personal Branding - Elevator Pitch
Personal Branding is about how you present yourself as an individual and is an important part of the volunteer and intern program. Waleed learned how to give an 'elevator pitch' a quick summary on himself, his volunteer path and his goals, as it is part of the team protocol to introduce yourself when first joining the SAcommunity Team at Connecting Up or when someone else is joining. This is great practice for job interviews or when entering a paid workplace, and it provides a short cut to onboarding for the team to meet and learn more about each other in 20 - 30 seconds ~ as long as an elevator ride.

Work experience - Internal and External Events, Connections and Networks

Work experience - Internal Connections - SAcommunity Team Meetings
Waleed also regularly participates in Connecting Up office life such as the SAcommunity agile team meetings. This was a new experience for him and quite valuable in understanding how they run as well as what is involved. He learned how he could improve his meeting minutes skills and how to contribute to them. Many of the meetings were online and carried out remotely over Zoom or Microsoft Teams while some were held onsite in the office in-person, or were available as a combination of both.

Work experience - Wider Networks - Infoxchange People & Culture Activities
Part of volunteering at Connecting Up is the opportunity to participate in the Infoxchange 'Lunch & Learn' sessions run by the People and Culture division of the wider organisation, where a variety of topics are covered to improve your knowledge of the workplace and your work skills.

IX Lunch & Learn Sessions
One of the sessions Waleed joined was offered by McKinsey on their '7 step problem solving process and how to apply it.' He found it greatly beneficial in terms of how to break down serious decisions and undertake planning in a professional work setting. The examples given helped him to understand the processes required and when asked to practise what was learnt in small groups on individually chosen issues, he saw how he could learn more about this field and how it had been applied across various issues. 

More recently Waleed attended a Lunch & Learn 5 December 2023 on Understanding the Microsoft 365 Apps from Rebecca Moss IX Sharepoint Specialist, to learn more about the Microsoft 365 Apps – Sharepoint, OneDrive and Teams and how to best utilise some of their features in day-to-day work activities.  

Connecting Up Digital Learning Training 
Waleed has been learning and developing his skills through online webinars provided by the Connecting Up Digital Learning platform, a training and development online learning platform with a selection of relevant live webinars and recorded webinars, workshops and webcons from a range of subject-matter experts who also have a deep experience with not-for-profits. 

The following webinars for professional training and development were selected by Waleed: 

Upgrading your digital marketing with Google Analytics 4, Ryan Jones
This webinar taught me what Google Analytics was, as well as how it could be used to help understand website performance and where improvements could be made. Attendees could also learn the difference between Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4. 

Cyber Security 101: Do you know how to keep your organisation secure?
In this webinar, I learnt about the current cyber threats facing organisations, the top five tips for employees to protect their organisations from the threats, the cybersecurity protections measures that organisations need to have in place and the resources to get the basics sorted. 

Preventing a Data Disaster, Adam Hack
By viewing this webinar, I gained the knowledge of what threats there are currently present for Not-for-profit organisations, why employees of such organisations would be targets and how these threats could be dealt with including an introduction to security disciplines, policies and tools. 




Microsoft Learn AI Skills Challenge
Waleed has been working in the Data Analytics Team and assisting other volunteer and interns for some time, consequently he is also building on his own skills through Microsoft Learn, to continue to help new team members as they join us.  

Thank you Waleed for volunteering with us!