Pics from Mill Road Winter fair 2011

Ben (in the dog suit) got rather too hot, while poor Pat was frozen running the tombola outside the shop for most of the afternoon. Grand total raised was £354.91, £22.86 of this from  the collecting boxes, just over £50 from the tombola and the rest from shop sales.

It just goes to prove that this shop can make money if we can only persuade people to realise we are here and come in.

Many of the people who visited on Saturday said how impressed they were by the shop and the interesting books available and that they hadn't realised we had a shop here (this roughly ten years after we first opened!)

We need more volunteers so that we can open six days a week. If you might be interested, please call in on a Saturday, drop in at our larger shop at 61 Burleigh street, or email info@rspca-cambridge.org.uk

Knackered...

On reception at the clinic all yesterday morning, with Patch, one of the cats I'm fostering fitted in at the end of the session. The abscess under her eye has healed up nicely, but unfortunately her skin condition is, if anything, worse than ever. She's now on steroids to try to clear up the inflammation and irritation and medicated baths to keep the skin clean and wash off allergens.

This morning I had an anxious call from on of our local "cat ladies", about a probable stray she's been feeding (shown in the picture). We're fairly certain that she's hyperthyroid and that someone has gone to the trouble of getting it diagnosed, because her throat has been shaved at the point where blood would be taken for the test. The major problem is that she doesn't seem to be going home at all, which is very bad news if she ought to be on medication for the condition. The vets were able to feel an enlarged thyroid, and she's got all the symptoms: extreme weight loss while eating ravenously, racing heart, thirst and excessive drinking.

Cycled over at 8 and collected her as the "least worst" option since if we take her in we do at least know for sure what's happening, while if we leave her where she is we've got no way of knowing whether or not she's returning home or getting any treatment at all. Hyperthyroidism is a common problem in elderly cats and is usually treatable with medication, but the longer a cat goes without treatment the greater the strain on her heart and kidneys.

To the charity shop at 11, but not a lot of customers due to the awful weather. This was compensated by lots of incoming donations of items to sell, including two enormous ones including loads of very good crockery, which should go well when the students return. The clothes donations included a bag of towels, which are very welcome with so many foster cats needing washable bedding.

We need to recruit more volunteers to help in the shops. If you are interested, please email camshop@rspca-cambridge.org.uk or newmarket@rspca-cambridge.org.uk (depending on your location).

Gift aid starting to pan out

After some initial teething trouble, I think we've now basically got the hang of running the gift aid system in our charity shops, and the first actual funds should appear in our bank account 6-8 weeks from now.

If you donate any items for sale and you are a UK income tax payer, please do complete a gift aid form, as it means an extra 28 pence for every pound raised when your donation is sold at no extra cost to you.

The process works on a bar code system. We take a sheet of bar code labels, all labels on a sheet having the same unique number. One label is stuck on your form and the others go on the price tags we put on your donations. When a donated item is sold, we scan the price tag at the till and the amount and donor number are recorded. During the night the till "phones home" and uploads details of everything scanned that day.

Once a reasonable sum has been recorded against your donor number, we print out and send you a letter telling you how much has been raised, and checking that you still wish to donate it to the branch. 24 days later (to give you a chance to demand your money!) we can put in a claim to HMRC for an amount equivalent to the tax you paid on that amount of income.

The need for the letters seems quite wasteful, but unfortunately they are a legal requirement if we want to operate the system, and there is a facility to avoid printing any which would cost more to post than the amount we would gain if we put in a claim.

It all sounds very complicated, but the degree of automation means it's actually harder to explain, than to do. Once the system has been running for a reasonable length of time, it should generate a steady amount of additional income as the gift aid forms come in and our claims go out to HMRC.

Sunday at 61 Burleigh Street

Huge thanks to everyone who donated so much fantastic china and books this week—please keep them coming.

As summer winds down, we could still do with more lightweight summer clothes since, at this time of year, shoppers are more likely to buy from charity shops than spend on new things they'll only wear for a few weeks if they need to replace clothes.

On Saturday we took in another injured cat, Riley, who will need surgery to repair her broken jaw. Your donations and purchases at our shops provide the funds to pay to treat her and other similar animals, so please keep up your support.

If you would like to make a donation by mobile phone to help with the cost of treating Riley, text the message PETS00 £10 to 70070 to donate £10 to RSPCA Cambridge. Your phone provider will add £10 to your bill and send £10 to our bank account. If you are a UK taxpayer and you complete the gift aid options we will receive an additional £2.80 at no cost to you.  

(The last two characters of PETS00 are zeros, not letters.)

Singing Westies!

Singing Westies!

I'm sure someone out there would love these.

Press their paws and they sing and do a little jig.

Many thanks to the kind donor and to everyone else who brought items last week.

The response to our appeal has been wonderful, but we need to keep up the momentum if we are to preserve our services, which are in greater demand than ever. It's quite frightening to think that we run the only low-cost small animal clinic in the whole of Cambridgeshire. If we close, many animals will have no source of veterinary treatment at all.

We also have a large collection of very nice collectable china dolls.

Explaining finances

Cambridge Evening News came over for a photo-session at the clinic today, with a view to doing a follow-up on the feature they did last month. I think they found my explanation of how our finances work confusing, if not positively evasive, and I'm wondering how it can be made more understandable.

Part of the problem seems to be an assumption that most charities have some kind of regular funding, either from grants or donations, which may dip (if the grant is cut, for example), in which case they then have a fixed sum they need to appeal for in order to fill the gap.

In our case, our regular income is generated by our shops. The good thing about this is that it's possible to increase it by working harder. The downside (and what's confusing) is that shops have running costs, so it's possible to have a very impressive turnover  (money taken) but relatively modest profit (money generated for use by the charity). 

So, for example with our new shop in Newmarket (I've rounded up the figures):

Monthly takings: £6,500

Monthly rent: £2,300

Monthly Wages: £1,000

Rates, heat etc: £300

That still means a net monthly profit over running costs of nearly £3,000 (although you need to bear in mind that we spent money fitting out the shop, so it's not an actual profit until we've fully covered those costs, which we should do in 10 months time). 

This is why the shop takings we need to achieve in order to fund our clinic and the rehoming and emergency veterinary treatment are such a lot larger than the costs of the programs themselves.

Once the shops' fixed running costs have been covered, everything else is a bonus, so if we can generate more sales, increase donations of items we can sell and so on, the percentage profit available to finance animal welfare will increase. More sales mean some extra overheads (for example electricity used to heat water for steam cleaning donations), but they're comparatively minor.

Rollercoaster week

After the high of our dog show, I got home to find Bambi hiding under my bed and obviously not well. Taxi to the 24 hour vet and she was put on a drip to support her liver, but sadly further tests and a scan showed that she'd finally gone into liver failure, 3 years after I adopted her, having been signed over to the branch by her previous owners, who couldn't cope with her medical condition.

Fifteen years isn't bad for a cat who developed a chronic condition at twelve, but I'm torn between relief that she had good quality of life right up to the last few days and sadness that it all happened so suddenly. Cycled over to the vet after working in the shop last Sunday and she's now buried in my garden.

As we approach the holidays, schools and youth groups start to think about end of term activities, and it's excellent that the St Matthews school Brownie pack and Barton Primary school were both kind enough to organise fundraising events to support us. Let's hope the children who got involved will be the RSPCA volunteers and trustees of the future.

Saturday was horribly wet, but today we had one of the best Sundays at the Burleigh St. shop for a long time, taking over £250. Very many thanks to all the people who donated so many really attractive items. 

The desperate need to keep funds coming in was made all too clear too, as I had two calls for help with the consultation fee for very sick animals. If we hadn't been here neither of them would have been seen by a vet today. 

This always involves very difficult decisions when we're called outside normal consulting hours, and the animal isn't registered with our clinic, as it's so expensive just to be seen and any help we give would go much further if it could wait until morning. Vets can't always tell whether something really is serious by asking the owner over the phone. 

Occasionally their judgement can be hopelessly wrong, as happened to me some years ago when a vet assured me the owner was just making a fuss, but in fact the cat didn't survive the night. I felt dreadful, and of course the owner blamed the RSPCA for the cat's death.

RSPCA bookshop at 188 Mill Road

These charming "Four Seasons" and cat prints were donated to our Books and Prints shop at 188 Mill Road.

Spring

Summer

Autumn

Winter

Mill Road doesn't really attract many shoppers during the week and the area is becoming more and more just a "dormitory" where people who work more centrally return at night. This means we can't justify paying a manager's salary for the shop, as we'd never sell enough to cover it. 

At the moment we can usually only open on Fridays and Saturdays, when we have enough volunteers. I've been on holiday from my paid job for the past few days, so I've experimentally taken in some of the branch paperwork I need to catch up with and done it at the staff desk. Results have been patchy. Thursday afternoon was pretty good, but yesterday was hardly worth the effort, with most people browsing rather than buying.

We do get a lot of good donations, that donors might not make the effort to cart all the way to our Burleigh Street shop, and I would really like to make the effort to keep 188 open for a full six days. If you have an interest in books, music CDs or pictures and think you might like to get involved, even for just a few hours each week, please email volunteering@rspca-cambridge.org.uk

Talking Tigger

Huge Tigger cuddly toy donated to our Burleigh Street Shop. Press his tummy and he talks.

Dining table for sale at Burleigh St charity shop

Varnished pine dining table to seat 6 people, plus chairs, for sale £80.

Wayne and Ffiona managed to collect it from the donor in their hatchback, but you would need a car with the capability of folding down the back seats to take it away.

(The crockery is not included).

Just donated at Burleigh St

This pic doesn't give a really good impression of how large these dolls actually are. They're porcelain with attractive costumes—rather the kind of doll little girls had in Victorian novels, although I think these are much later replicas.

Many thanks to the generous person who brought them in.

The two giant chess pieces

These giant chess King and Queen pieces were donated to our Burleigh Street shop last Sunday.
(Update: now sold).

Volunteer opportunity: Donate, Don't Dump Day

Gracie is looking for a home

Could you organise a "Donate, Don't Dump" day at your workplace, school or college?

The idea is that you ask everyone to try to bring in one item that's suitable to be sold in our charity shops.

Almost everyone has something that's too good to throw out but they never use or wear.

You can either bring the collected items to our shop, or we can collect them provided we have enough warning in advance.

This opportunity would be particularly suitable for school pupils who are not old enough to volunteer directly with the branch as it can be done at school (provided your teachers are happy with the idea.)

If you would like to organise a "Donate, Don't Dump" event, please email camshop@rspca-cambridge.org.uk or newmarket@rspca-cambridge.org.uk (depending on whether you are local to Cambridge or Newmarket.

Sunday at our Burleigh St shop

Ffiona and Teresa have created an amazing "floating handbag" display.

We took £183, making this the best Sunday so far. Many thanks to the donor of the writing bureau which sold for £50.

Please keep the donations coming! We sell over 100 items in a typical day, so we need to receive at least 100 items to keep the sales area well-stocked.

Results of the volunteers' hard work at E61

We still need to improve the lighting, but it's amazing what an improvement filling in the cracks  and repainting can produce.

We're now putting out our summer stock and (as always!) more donations would be much appreciated.

If you would like to drop off donations by car, you can get to the back entrance of the charity shop via Paradise street which runs parallel to Burleigh st.

Please phone ahead (01223 312 802) to let us know you're coming, so we can let you in, or just park behind the shop and come round to the front entrance.

Charity shop this Sunday

We took £186 and Phil managed to get a lot of shelf-filling and tidying done in the book section, while Jefferson held the fort at the till.

Vinyl records are still popular sellers. If you have any old records that you no longer want, don't throw them away; we can turn them into cash to help animals in need.

Can anyone tell us more about this print?

It was donated to our Burleigh St shop at the same time as the assorted owl pictures and ornaments. It's a limited edition print by Kenn Burrows who seems to have been a modestly famous artist in the 1960s.

Sunday at the Burleigh St shop

Wren ornament

Long-tailed tits

"Compulsory Education"

We're regularly taking £100+ on Sundays now, which makes it well worth doing as it's more than we'd expect to raise by "stand-alone" events like jumble sales and all of it can go towards helping animals as this is the one day when it's possible to staff the shop with all volunteers.

Owl eggstravaganza!

These are just a few of the delightful owl-themed objects which have been generously donated to our Burleigh Street shop.

There are also many other attractive pictures and ornaments of birds and other animals.

If you love owls, do come along and browse.

We'd also like to thank Debenhams for donating the glass display units which show off all the ornaments most effectively.