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.
- If, for example, 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 fairly consistent access to some form of personal transport. I tried this approach using public transport, which is very good in London, and it took ages and started getting costly in terms of fares quite quickly.
- 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 group. Saturday and Sunday are both days many people are happy to drop things off, if given enough notice. We've not tried this approach at Kingston, and one potentially important issue is that even though you won't have to put your address in the original email, you might still end up having to give it to more people than you might feel comfortable with.
- If you're able to store stuff at the venue you'll be using for the event itself, frankly, you're laughing. We were able to do this for quite a while at the Environment Centre here in Kingston, and it made setting up the event far easier than it was when all of the various items were stored off-site.
We put ADMINs on our group to let people know that one of us would be at the Environment centre on Saturday or Sunday between, say, 10am and 2pm, and that anyone who wanted to donate some items to our collection could do so by dropping them off at the centre. This worked very well, and gave us a chance to cull some of the items which were just rubbish – too tatty or worn out to have any chance of being collected by visitors to the event.
- 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 Freegle rules.
In my experience, the best way to get together the largest quantity of stuff is 3). Using the other approaches, you'll receive smaller amounts, but done properly, 2) and 4) are still infinitely preferable to 1). If all you're looking for is enough items to cover a small table, 1) then becomes a viable proposition.
