Collecting Stuff

How you go about finding stock for your event is likely to depend on how much you'll be giving away and what sort of access you have to your venue before the event.

Think about:

• what type of items you want
• how many items you want
• how you will transport them
• how you will dispose of them if not taken at the event

Plan ahead and things will go much smoother at the event!

• If you want to be able give away lots of stuff, collecting it all yourself from individual Freegle members is either very laborious, or just downright impractical, as it's very time-consuming and you will need fairly consistent access to some form of personal transport. Public transport is impractical for lots of items.

• If you have space at home to store Freegle items, you can start building up a collection by putting out requests for items as ADMINs on your community. Saturday and Sunday are both days many people are happy to drop things off, if given enough notice. You might wish to be wary about giving your address details to too many people.

• If you're able to store stuff at the venue you'll be using for the event itself, frankly, you're laughing. It makes setting up the event far easier than it is when all of the various items are stored off-site. If you can do this, you could place ADMINs on your community to let people know that someone will be at the venue at a certain day(s) and time, and that anyone who wanted to donate some items to the collection could do so by dropping them off. This can work very well, and gives a chance to cull some of the items which are just rubbish – too tatty or worn out to have any chance of being collected by visitors to the event - as you will inevitably end up with some of those.

• Another popular approach is, of course, to ask members to bring items on the day of the event, although it's still vital to have at least a reasonable number of items there for the first browsers to have a look at, since it will take you and your volunteers a while to sort through donations as they come in, and vet them to make sure they're all appropriate and conform to legal and any other requirements you have.

• Before you collect items, though, please have a plan for what you will do with them if the event is cancelled or they are not taken on the day. Some can be freegled by you and your volunteers, but larger amounts might need storage until another event or taken to a charity shop. Or maybe you can get a charity shop to collect from you on the understanding they will take everything and not pick and choose.

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