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Eproductive were happy to provide the prizes for the draw at the Association of Charity Shops annual conference for the second year running.
The theme for this year’s conference was ‘Tomorrow’s Retailing World’ with a strong focus on looking to the future with sessions on online charity shops proving popular. This was an ideal opportunity for Eproductive to promote the launch of www.mycharityshop.com which gained a lot of interest from clients and non-clients alike.
The lucky winners of the Prize Draw were:
1st Prize (Apple iPad): Ilana Ebrahimi, All Aboard (pictured with Eproductive’s Chris Cowls))
2nd Prize (2 nights dinner, B&B for 2 at a Ramada Jarvis hote): Pam Senior, St Ann's Hospice
3rd Prize (Apple iPod Touch): Tariq Thubani-Hacker, CLIC Sargent
Congratulations to all of the winners!
The annual Help the Hospices Retail Conference took place in Manchester this year, and Eproductive was happy to part-sponsor it once again.
There was a fantastic turnout, with attendees from hospice charity shop chains across the UK. Speakers included Warren Alexander, Chief Executive of the Association of Charity Shops and David McCullogh, Head of Trading for Oxfam.
Four representatives were available to discuss the wide range of services that Eproductive offers the sector, including the imminent launch of mycharityshop.com – a new initiative that enables every charity shop to have its own webpage.
Eproductive has around 40 hospice clients – see the EpR clients section of this website for more information.
The UK charity retail sector has the potential to raise an extra £75million from the tax-man each year* – and it’s as simple as a signature to help it reclaim these much needed vital funds.
Currently 4,000 charity shops in the UK are claiming gift aid on donated items (which represents approximately half of the charity retail sector) and collectively raised an estimated £18.7million through the tax efficient system in the financial year ending March 2009*.
Although Gift Aid on donated items was established by Sue Ryder Care three and a half years ago (May 2006) – in which time the healthcare charity has secured an extra £5million to support it provide health and social care nationwide - the full potential of the system remains unrealised.
Minister for the Third Sector, Angela Smith, showed her support for the Gift Aid system by becoming a member when she visited her local Sue Ryder Care shop in Essex recently. She said: “Gift Aid is a simple way for people to help charities raise extra funds they so desperately need to support a wide range of voluntary services and organisations that improve the quality of lives – and the society we live in - nationwide.”
The Gift Aid System, which is compliant with Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, works by allowing the charity to track all gift aided sales by donor. All that is required is signed permission from the person donating the goods for charities to claim 28p Gift Aid on every pound raised on the sale of donated items.
Angela added: “In these recessionary times, every extra 28p counts and, as Sue Ryder Care has proved, collectively can equate to millions of pounds. Sue Ryder Care’s success at reaching £5million from Gift Aid demonstrates that a simple signature really can make a difference.”
All money raised through the sale of gift aided donated items at Sue Ryder Care’s shops helps the charity to provide end of life and long term care to people living with conditions including; Cancer, Stroke, Brain Injury, Multiple Sclerosis, Dementia, Huntington’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease and Motor Neurone Disease.
Julie Beames, Retail Business Development Manager at Sue Ryder Care – who implemented and manages the Gift Aid system in the charity’s 350 shops, added: “Our shop staff, volunteers and customers have really embraced the Gift Aid system as a means to help the charity raise much needed funds. We currently have 300,000 gift aid members that support us, and on average 40% of all donated items sold in our shops are gift aided. However, with 60% of donated items to our shops nationwide not gift aided there is still huge potential to raise even more extra funds.
“I’d encourage everybody to sign on the line and become a gift aid member. By doing so, people can help us to make a real difference to the quality of thousands of people’s lives.”
*figures supplied by the Association of Charity Shops
On 10th November, Eproductive held its first ever conference for its charity retail clients.
There were around 70 delegates on the day, representing 35 charities from all across the UK.
The conference was held in St Martin’s Hall at the newly refurbished St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square where Eproductive CEO Chris Cowls is a Trustee of the Development Trust.
There were sessions led by representatives from HMRC Charities and specialist fundraising agency beautiful world and presentations given by Eproductive staff, informing of enhancements and developments to current systems, as well as a taster of what we have in store.
The day was a great chance for our clients to get together, share ideas and best practice and celebrate the success of EpR Gift Aid. With over £4.6million of Gift Aid-able sales entered via the system each month, there’s certainly been a lot to celebrate!
Eproductive is happy to welcome The Katharine House Hospice as the 50th EpR Gift Aid client.
The Katharine House Hospice is based in Adderbury, Oxfordshire and has six charity shops supporting it, including a furniture shop.
Katharine House’s Retail & Trading Manager, Scott Bloomfield says: “We have been signing donors up to Gift Aid in our Banbury furniture shop for about 18 months now using a paper-based system, and have seen great results with a conversion rate of around 40%. We wanted to roll the scheme out to our other shops, but a manual system is a lot of effort to maintain, and doesn’t allow us to see up-to-date results on a daily basis, so we decided to sign up to EpR Gift Aid.”
Scott continues: “Although our shop managers were concerned at first that the system would be difficult to learn and mean more work, all their worries have already been put to rest. The training provided by Eproductive was excellent and in our first week we have already signed up nearly 200 donors across the chain! We are looking forward to receiving our first month’s benchmarking results to see how our performance compares to other chains.”
Between them, EpR Gift Aid clients are using the system in well over 2,500 shops across the country and have the details of over 1.3million supporters.
This month, Charity Finance published their annual Charity Shops Survey in association with Professional Fundraising. There were 69 charity retail chains that responded to the survey, with over 5,000 shops between them.
We were pleased to see that the introduction included a report on Gift Aid from the sale of donated goods. In the survey period (to Mar/Apr 09) respondents had claimed over £6.5million in Gift Aid from HMRC. This is a huge increase on the £2.2million stated in last year's survey.
Respondents also claimed that the investment needed to implement a Gift Aid scheme, including the necessary technology/hardware takes an average of 5.3 months to recover.
