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Believe in better – finding out more about our Sky Cares volunteers

Sporting Memories in Scotland has been working with Sky, the broadcast and telecoms provider, for a couple of years now offering employees the chance to volunteer at some of our Clubs.  

This is part of the Sky Cares programme and staff from their centres in Glasgow and Dunfermline have become a very welcome part of the Sporting Memories volunteer family. 

After undergoing our training programme, they have visited various weekly Club meetings to offer a helping hand. 

Helping customers 

We caught up recently with Elaine McCormack, who works at the Sky Dunfermline office and has been helping out at our Dunfermline Abbeyview Club.  

Elaine currently works for the Accessibility department. As part of that team for over 10 years, Elaine helps customers who may have mobility problems to organise help from engineers if needed. She also makes sure that any customer with vision, hearing or cognitive issues get the best out of their viewing experience. However, her 20 years overall experience with Sky has given her a very wide insight as well as providing her with the ability to recognise a caller’s needs quickly. 

Quite often loneliness becomes one of the key issues with customers and Elaine is quick to spot this and encourages her callers to chat a bit. A good tip Elaine shared for initiating a chat is spotting a sporting affinity in a customer name or password choice. She then finds it very easy to keep a conversation going and perhaps brighten that person’s day all the while sorting the issue which initiated the call in the first place. 

Helping members 

Elaine’s sporting interests are wide with football both locally and across the border taking top spot with golf a close second. So, her interests and work experience made her a super volunteering candidate. 

She did confess to being quite a shy and quiet person so that first visit was a bit daunting, but after about five minutes in the company of such a jovial group of sports fans her confidence just kept growing each week.   

We asked if she had a stand-out memory from her time with us but she couldn’t single one out. The joy of watching people chat, share memories and chipping in with her own was more than enough for Elaine. She was also a very welcome hand at one of the most important tasks each week – making sure the refreshments were shared and top-ups when needed. 

Although she did let slip that she had noted which team was usually the victorious at the weekly Quiz and therefore made every effort to be sitting with them!!! We won’t tell, Elaine! 

Thank you to all the Sky volunteers across Scotland. You are brilliant!