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Charity shops struggle to attract high-value donations

Fundraising | Gemma Ware | 1 Jun 2007

Punters are proving reluctant to donate high-value items to charity shops, according to new research by nfpSynergy.

The findings from questions within the think-tank's Charity Awareness Monitor, commissioned by the Association of Charity Shops, found that only 10 per cent of respondents would donate items worth over £50 to charity shops.

The average maximum value of an item people said they would donate to charity was £26, with a third of respondents saying they would only donate items worth between £10 and £19.99. A further 37 per cent said they would not donate anything worth over £9.99.

More people said they had donated to a charity shop than made a purchase in one. While 80 per cent of respondents said they had made a donation within the last 12 months, including 6 per cent who said they had donated more than 15 times in that period, only 65 per cent said they bought anything in a charity shop.

Worries in the charity shop community that potential customers and donors were turning instead to online auctions proved unfounded, with the same amount - 64 per cent of respondents reporting they had made purchases through online auctions such as eBay.

Just under half of respondents said they would expect to pay more for an item at an online auction than in a charity shop, reflected in an average of £33 spent on an online auction.

Young people were much more inclined to use online auctions than charity shops. Whereas only 48 per cent of 16 to 24-year-olds made a purchase in a charity shop in the last year, 75 per cent of them bought something through an online auction. The older generation were more likely to use a charity shop, with 70 per cent of over-65s making a purchase in one over the last year compared to 46 per cent who used an online auction.

The results also showed that while clothing and non-electrical household items were the most popular items worth under £50 to donate to a charity shops, with over half of respondents saying they would donate them, CDs, DVDs, electrical goods such as mobile phones or cameras and jewellery were the most popular items people sold for personal profit, with over 15 per cent of people saying they would use the internet to sell them and keep the proceeds.

'White goods' such as fridges and freezers were the least likely to be donated to a charity shop, with the majority of people saying they would throw them away or request a council collection.

Joe Saxton, driver of ideas at nfpSynergy, said the results showed there was an "increasing complexity in the way people make their decision".

"People are really quite discerning about the value of the item, type of item and the best place they are able to sell it to raise money for themselves or charities," he said.

Saxton said the charity shop community had a "job of reassurance and comfort" to do to convince customers that if they donated items worth over £50 to a charity shop, the items would be sold for that value.

Julie Beams, business development manger at Sue Ryder Care, which introduced a gift aid scheme on donated goods last year, said: "Items over £50 tend to be either bric-a-brac or furniture items with the majority of donated stock being clothing falling below this threshold."
 
"I do not feel that the majority of supporters of Sue Ryder Care actually consider the value of the items donated to us but instead the decision is that the items are surplus to requirements with the need to free up wardrobe space etc."
 
Beams added that the charity's own research found that 35 per cent of customers spent over £10 in their shops, with ladieswear, bric-a-brac and books being the most popular purchases.

Lekha Klouda, executive secretary of the Association of Charity Shops, said the findings were a 'useful bit of new information to help target a new audience that is obviously very different from the traditional charity shop audience'.

"Visiting online auctions was not as widespread as people who go into charity shops," said Klouda, adding that two out of three people still bought from charity shops. She said the association had shared the statistics with its members and would use the findings as baseline data it would follow up over the next few years.

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