My Volunteer Experience - New Volunteer Oscar Bigiolli
Photo: Volunteer Oscar Bigiolli
This National Volunteer Week 17 - 23 May 2021, Connecting Up would like to thank our wonderful volunteers working across a number of roles, keeping the SAcommunity database updated, performing data analysis for coucils and highlight community organisations by writing articles for SAcommunity eNews.
We would also like to take this opportunity to introduced some of our fabulous volunteers and share their experiences. Oscar has recently joined the team at Connecting Up on 13 April 2021, Oscar retired on 7 April 2022 contributing multiple media stories for SAcommunity >>here and shares his story below as part of our series on our volunteers for National Volunteer Week.
My Volunteering Experience - Oscar Bigiolli:
My name is Oscar Bigiolli and I have only recently become a Volunteer Information Officer for Connecting Up. The reason behind volunteering for the organisation is to better my skills and knowledge as an office/admin worker. I had received my Bachelor of Business (Marketing) degree from the University of South Australia in 2018, which was where I learnt marketing theories from the respected Ehrenberg-Bass Institute.
I then undertook a bunch of internships and small jobs over the course of a year with disability organisation Mobo Group, newspaper company Australian Chinese Newspaper Group, and digital marketing agency Client Generation. In particular, my time at Client Generation really advanced my digital expertise with social media (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram), websites (WordPress) and analytic services (Google Analytics).
I had an opportunity for steady work as a production assistant/hand for Mobo Group in 2019 for a year and a half. They had a packaging plant in Oakden that needed a few people to speed up production and assist workers with a disability. This was something different for me and helped develop my management and people skills, gaining a deeper understanding of how to support and engage with people every day.
Going forward, I want find a job that utilises my Business degree. That is why I’m here at Connecting Up, to shake off some rust and continue my self-development. I started this month and it has been a good experience so far. I've begun updating and using the community information database and now looking at SAcommunity social media and how I can contribute, having recently attended a Connecting Up training webinar to Activate your Marketing Action Plan: Top tips and strategies for non-profits. For my first story I interviewed fellow volunteer Hang Zhang for National Volunteer Week >>here. Everyone is friendly and helpful. It’s a really nice team.
Update February 2022:
Things have been going smoothly at SAcommunity since I started earlier in May 2021. Since then I have been actively writing articles on community services for SAcommunity media on the blog that are all available >>here.
In particular, the Australian Society of Magicians interview was a fun and interesting story and my favourite so far. I've started collating Community Event Calendars and I've started the SAcommunity Instagram to create an alternate media channel to display some of the many SAcommunity photos from our community and volunteer stories.
Brad Atkinson, Digital Marketing Coordinator for the Infoxchange Group and my chosen mentor, recently introduced us to Bee Pro https://beefree.io/ and I'm looking forward to using this email design tool for our next eNews campaign.
[Ed note: We are glad to report that Oscar moved into a full time employment in a business in April 2022]
Interested in reading Oscar Bigiollis' storytelling articles? Find them >>here
