Charity Shop Exchange

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Inspiration

Every year 11,000 charity shops raise more than £295m for a range of causes in the UK. These shops are now closed - they are missing out on vital revenue and face a much tougher path back to normality than most retail businesses.

What it does

Charity Shop Exchange offers a subscription service of books & DVDs. People need new things to read and watch - especially when feeling isolated - and our subscription service facilitates this in an economical way. Subscribers receive (weekly, bi-weekly or monthly) a selection of books and DVDs which have been sourced from local charity shops.

For charity shops this service not only helps them stay close to their existing customers it also brings them a stream of entirely new customers.

How we built it

The charityshopexchange.com website was built over the last four weeks. When you select a region, pick a charity and click on Continue you'll see a launching soon message.

During the EUvVirus hackathon weekend we deployed a staging version of the website - develop.charityshopexchange.com - now when you click on Continue you'll see the modal interface that we developed over the weekend. This allows people to choose the genres of books & DVDs they'd like to receive. We also hooked it up to a 3rd party subscription service to prepare for subscription payments.

Challenges we ran into

Charity shops rely heavily upon volunteers, many who are in the vulnerable category themselves or may live with someone who is; so it could be much longer before staffed shops are viable.

To combat shop closures we developed a "landing page" - with appropriate messaging to persuade other businesses to help us support charities and to mitigate the shop closures. With items being collected at pop-up-drop-off-points we can launch our service faster.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're particularly proud of the marketing & communication materials we developed during the EUvVirus hackathon weekend, readying us for launch! All of these assets are in this folder > https://drive.google.com/open?id=1btUqVqtYeC-9qbqXYLWrotrCZcA1npfn

What we learned

We learned a lot about Open Graph images, why they're a powerful to tool for social media marketing, and how to optimise our designs and messaging for that format.

What's next for Charity Shop Exchange

On the tech side we'll iron out the modal interface, it must be more intuitive and needs to allow people to select both books and DVDs at the same time. We'll then be ready to open up for subscribers.

Our marketing activity is ready for takeoff! We'll start by tweeting at charities to drive registrations on the supply side. We'll also target local organisations that could help us connect supply with demand. When the supply-side is primed and ready we'll turn our attention to community groups on Facebook, to market the subscription service.

We've carefully designed the service to be sustainable beyond the current crisis.

To maximise Charity Shop Exchange's potential and impact we'd like to have a small team of marketeers working full-time on this for at least the next 6 months. We want to ensure that all the people who have to be shielded from society know that our service is something that can help them get through these isolating times.

To hear more about how we're helping the great British institution of charity shops stay close to their customers follow us on Twitter @CharityShopEx