Our Charity shop fills a unique niche in Shrewsbury for families on a budget to access good quality baby essentials, children’s clothing and maternity wear at affordable prices, whilst raising vital funds for our core service. To build on this success, our short-term project has been designed to recruit volunteers to help us streamline our donation process. Sitting alongside our regular service offer, this bespoke project would provide us the time and resources needed to focus on volunteer recruitment and training, whilst also enabling us to enhance engagement with the older children and pregnant women who are referred to us to come into the shop and select their own clothing. The project should lead to long term benefits for our core services deepening awareness and understanding of the needs of our beneficiaries, volunteers and customers.
What we'll deliver:
- Volunteer and training opportunities for local members of the community.
- Manual handling training, till training, Customer experience training, stock handling and quality check training.
- Safe storage solutions for donations and stock.
- Improved stock management to streamline our donation process giving us the ability to respond quickly to requests.
- More uptake of the personal shopping experience due to having trained volunteers to assist with this.
Why it's a great idea:
Through the addition of trained volunteers, we’ll be able to streamline the donation process and see where we have stock shortfalls. Having better visibility and understanding of our stock will be hugely beneficial not only to shop stock rotation but also to our referral service, benefitting our customers and beneficiaries. In cases of emergency requests volunteers will be in a better position to help with processing these, easing the pressure on all operations.
Training volunteers in customer service and stock management will enable them to welcome families coming into store to select their own clothing. They can prepare for each unique shopping visit, improving the individual’s experience and feeling comfortable in catering to their needs. The social and employment skills volunteers will gain through this project will benefit their emotional and physical wellbeing. It also has the potential to have a financial benefit to the individual, society, local authority and health services
Steps to get it done:
- Recruit dedicated volunteers to support the personal shopping appointments
- Book and attend training courses
- Purchase plastic boxes for safe storage solutions
- Host volunteering days to sort and transfer donations from current storage cardboard boxes into plastic boxes.
- Advertise and host Duke of Edinburgh work experience placements