Officeworks Pinpoint magazine 29 | Page 23

National Partnerships Meet Pam Ryan, our highest fundraising team member Pam Ryan (Team Member) from Officeworks Nowra (NSW) is one of many passionate team members and has consistently helped her store to make big contributions to our appeals. Pam has shared some tips on how to engage with our customers during the appeal: • Be grateful for all donations big or small, every little bit really does add up. • Be passionate about what you’re doing and genuine in how you ask. Find out about the causes we support so you can be confident when asking. • Simply ask customers but don’t be pushy, its ok if a customer doesn’t want to donate. Pam also said ‘for me, I totally believe in the fundraiser. Children deserve the right to an education and a good life. Given a chance like this a child can draw on the experience throughout their lives and so make a difference to them for the rest of their lives. I do believe children are our future. We have a great community in Nowra who understand the importance of our children. They get behind it with pride. Being a small store and raising what we did shows this.’ Peter Manning (Store Business Manager, Officeworks Nowra) also had this to share on Pam’s achievement: ‘Pam has worked tirelessly over the BTS period, doing her best and inspiring others to help make bigger things happen for The Smith Family. Pam, who works four days a week, has single-handedly raised over $6600 for the Back to School Appeal. She has always been a leader in the store when it comes to community contributions, but this year Pam wanted to out-do the excellent results she achieved last year, to help the store beat its target as well as contributing to the national target of 1000 sponsorships. Each morning before she commenced, Pam would check in with the SLT for a daily update, she would then talk to all the team members who were at POS or using Mobile POS to fire them up for another big day. She made sure that there were cards at each of the registers. Pam, without fail, over the time of the appeal has asked 100 per cent of the customers she served, and she made sure that those that were working beside her were also asking.’ NSW 1 — our highest fundraising region Quinn Hutchens (Store Business Manager) from Officeworks Five Dock (NSW) did a fantastic job, leading the NSW1 team to achieve the results they did and had this to share with the team: ‘NSW1’s passion and determination to support disadvantaged students through sponsorships for their education was nothing short of AMAZING. Last year, NSW1 only raised $47,670 and we felt that we could do more to help make bigger things happen within the community space. This year we set ourselves targets throughout the appeal and with daily focus being driven by myself and Tracy Reynolds (Area Manager — NSW 1) and we were able to achieve record breaking results that have never been achieved before in the history of Officeworks. result especially given we are one of the smallest area groups with only 12 stores. With a target of 98 students to sponsor, we wanted to exceed this target to support as many students as possible. Not only did we break through over $100k raised and exceeded our student sponsorship but we also finished first nationally as an area group and we had four stores Lewisham, Greenacre, Punchbowl and Nowra finish in the top five.’ As an area group, NSW1 raised $104,864 and sponsored 168 students — exceeding our target by 70 students — which is a fantastic Well done Quinn, Tracy and all of the NSW 1 team members on this outstanding achievement. 23