Volunteer Recruitment
Victoria State Emergency Service
How do you recruit volunteers when the experience is about much more than emergencies?
Most people recognise the orange uniforms.
But volunteering with VICSES can mean far more than responding when something goes wrong.
It can mean ...
Searching bushland.
Working from a State Control Centre.
Helping someone after a road crash.
Learning new skills.
Making friends.
Or simply becoming part of a group of people who want to help their community.
For Victoria State Emergency Service, we created a series of recruitment films designed to show the whole volunteer experience — not just what volunteers give, but what they get back.
Using the voices of volunteers themselves, supported by cinematic footage captured across very different locations and activities, the series explored three simple ideas:
Community. Skills. Purpose.
At a glance
4 volunteer recruitment films
Community + Skills + Volunteer Experience
1 music-led promotional film
20+ volunteer interviews
Multiple VICSES units and locations
Beach / Bush / Suburban / Control Centre
Day + night filming
Drone + documentary footage
Web / Social / Presentations
The Client Breif
VICSES wanted prospective volunteers to understand something that can be difficult to communicate in a recruitment advertisement:
what does being an SES volunteer actually feel like?
The obvious answer is helping people during emergencies.
But that's only part of the experience.
Volunteers also develop practical skills, form friendships, work as part of a team and become more connected to their local communities.
The films therefore needed to appeal to people with different motivations — someone wanting to contribute, someone looking for new experiences, someone keen to build skills or someone simply wanting to meet people and become part of something meaningful.
That thinking still sits at the centre of VICSES volunteer recruitment today: its current material highlights teamwork, new skills, meeting people and making a positive impact alongside emergency-response activities.
Our Approach
Ask the volunteers first.
Before planning the filming, we interviewed volunteers.
Lots of them.
Rather than beginning with a predetermined recruitment script, we conducted short audio-only conversations asking people why they joined, what surprised them, what they had learned, what memories stayed with them and what volunteering had added to their own lives.
We deliberately sought a broad mix of genders, ages, backgrounds and SES experiences.
The interview guide moved beyond operational questions to ask about friendship, skills, purpose, community connection and whether volunteers felt they were making a difference.
Those recordings were then edited into an audio narrative before the major filming days.
From there, we could build the pictures around what volunteers had actually told us.
Show the breadth.
One of the challenges was avoiding the impression that SES volunteering means doing one particular job.
So the shoot moved through very different environments.
On the Bellarine Peninsula we filmed beach searches, vehicles, tree removal, sandbagging and volunteers preparing to respond.
In Kinglake we captured bush search-and-rescue, motorbike searches, incident management and a night-time road-rescue scenario.
In Melbourne we filmed the State Control Centre, community education and suburban response activity.
That variety is one of the strengths of the finished films.
The viewer moves rapidly between beaches, bushland, roads, control rooms, training environments and local SES units — reinforcing just how many different ways someone can contribute.
The images move between practical training and real-world application, showing people learning together rather than presenting volunteers as experts from day one.
That is still an important part of the VICSES offer. Volunteers currently receive accredited training across areas including first aid, rescue, chainsaw operations, community education and specialist emergency-response roles.
The message becomes reassuring as well as aspirational:
you don't need to arrive knowing how to do everything.
Together, the films answer the recruitment question from several directions.
Not simply:
“Why does SES need volunteers?”
But:
“Why might volunteering with SES be something worth doing with part of your life?”