Donating goods? Help us ensure every donation makes a difference
At St Michael’s Hospice, our shops couldn’t raise the essential funds needed without your generous, good-quality donations.
We love and appreciate the support you offer us, but sadly, our charity shops are seeing an increase in fly-tipping outside of their donation hours and we need your help.
With recent changes to the opening hours at our Home & Living Donation Centres, we wanted to reshare some facts to help raise awareness of this issue and make sure our supporters have all the information to ensure their donations make a difference.
Here are 4 things you may not have known about donating goods to us:
1. We have to bin items left at our shops or in our doorways outside of donating hours.
It may sound extreme but leaving bags or boxes outside of a charity shop’s donation/open hours counts as fly-tipping. We cannot guarantee that having been left out in the elements, that they are safe for sale and as such they must be disposed of. If you have quality items to donate, please consider donating to a different location or waiting until a day we are open.
2. We shoulder the cost of disposing of items we cannot sell
Whether an item has been fly-tipped, or it doesn’t follow our donation guidelines, if we can’t sell it, it is the Hospice that shoulders the cost of disposal. Every £1 we have to spend on waste removal is £1 that is not going towards Hospice Care.
3. Processing unsalable goods wastes our team’s time
Please do not be offended if our teams ask about the contents of your donation. Every item we receive has to be processed by us and when our staff and volunteers open bags full of items are not suitable, it takes time away from sorting goods that can raise funds. By ensuring you know our ‘Donation Dos & Don’ts’ before donating you’ll be saving our charity shops both time and money.
4. Donation centre closures are for the safety of our teams
St Michael’s Hospice Shops are lucky to receive hundreds of donations each week. Our teams work hard to get items onto the shop floors as soon as possible but when large quantities of donations arrive, we must prioritise team safety and pause donations while items are processed or stored appropriately.
We have recently implemented Monday closures for donations at our Home & Living shops to combat the high volumes of donations our teams are receiving each week. This extra day ensures staff and volunteers can prioritise getting amazing donations processed and onto the shop floor to make money, before more items come in.
We understand that it can be frustrating to arrive at one of our shops and not be able to donate. We don’t want you to have a wasted journey, so please call our shops in advance or use the ‘Shop Finder’ on our website to confirm donation times. We will always do our best to display any temporary or unexpected shop closures on our shops’ Facebook or Instagram pages, so make sure you’re following those accounts too.
Still have questions about donating goods? Get in contact with our retail team via email retail@smhospicehereford.org
Related shops
Hereford – Whitecross Road
Hereford – Whitestone Business Park
Leominster – Station Yard
