Haggling!

Our shop volunteers are usually a cheerful bunch who take everything in their stride, but one thing they find really stressful is customers who try to beat them down on price. 

Some of those who try this on are pretty obviously dealers, and a few of them will put on quite a lot of pressure when they think they might be able to bully an inexperienced volunteer into letting them have something for much less than it's really worth so they can later sell it on at a profit.

Quite honestly this is sometimes verging on theft—after all, the original donor gave the item to raise money to help animals, not to line someone else's pockets. It's unfair to the volunteer on the till, and if they do give way it potentially loses future donations for the shop because donors won't give worthwhile items if they know they'll be sold at stupidly low prices. Haggling also disrupts the working of the shop because it usually means the person on the till has to call the shop manager for a definite ruling, which means the manager isn't getting on with the back-room work.

In this respect the gift aid system is a bit of a mixed blessing. The way the system works means donors get regular reports on what we've managed to raise from their goods, and we've had some very positive feedback saying how nice it is to know how well the sales went. The downside is that donors will also know if the amount raised is suspiciously low. If that happens regularly they're not going to come back—and there's an underlying concern that they may be wondering if we are pilfering stock. 

Spend at our shops and help keep animals in homes this Christmas

Reports of animals being abandoned or relinquished by owners who can't afford to care for them are coming in from all sides.

It seems that a toxic spiral is building up in which owners put off vaccination, spaying and neutering because of cost and then are faced with sick animals they can't afford to get treated, or with litters of unwanted babies they can't rehome.

Pumpkin, Little Owl and the three Shepherd cross puppies were all probably abandoned because they were ill and their owners were afraid of the cost of seeking treatment.

Some owners are so neglectful or so incompetent that  their animals are better off without them, but in the vast majority of cases it is far better to help animals to stay in their own homes than to spend funds keeping them in boarding kennels until they can be found new ones.  If animals are being relinquished because they are ill and the owner can't afford a vet, it's much more efficient to spend money on treatment than to spend money on treatment and boarding.

, 

Times are tough, and we all need to spend our money as efficiently as possible. Over the next months—probably years—there are going to be more demands on our ability to provide help with veterinary care than ever.

Can you help us by diverting some of the spending you would be doing anyway in the direction of our shops? Most of us are going to spend something on Christmas cards and presents in the next few weeks. By purchasing some of them from our charity shops you'll be helping to keep our welfare services in action.

In the Alice in Wonderland times in which we live, prices for rags are good—to the point where we have to keep a sharp eye on the bags we're hauling out to the rag collector's van or they get nicked! If you're having a clear-out, we can turn clothes and other textiles into useful funds even if they are too worn to sell in the shop. Don't throw them out; drop them off to us. 

Vinyls!

Many thanks to the donor of about four hundred vinyl records. We started the mammoth task of getting them out on the shop floor today.  We're now about half-way through and have already raised over £70 from the first sales.

Thank-you also to Nicola and Michael who shipped the first two loads over to our Burleigh Street shop and to Anton for going through them checking for the most collectible ones which are likely to be worth more than the rest. I never knew before that some vinyls were made from white plastic instead of the usual black (they look rather like white chocolate) and are collectible because they're unusual.

We hope (if Nicola and Michael can bear it) to transfer the second half next Saturday and put them out on the shop floor at Burleigh Street on the Sunday.

Why use volunteers?

This might seem entirely obvious — we use volunteers to make more money available to help animals — but it's currently a hot topic in general volunteering circles, with some people saying that it's better to cut services than to replace staff with volunteers, and others rather more sensibly arguing that half a loaf is better than no bread and it's preferable to keep a few staff supported by volunteer helpers than making everyone redundant.

From the standpoint of an animal charity I have to admit I find the repeated assertions that volunteers should never, never be seen as "free labour" a bit strange. Volunteers are donating their time and it makes no sense to insist on devising complicated explanations of why this isn't the really important bit of volunteering.

If you're a stray cat with a broken leg, you need a qualified, paid vet to fix it, but you need volunteers to raise the cash that pays the vet.

If you happen to be a merchant banker, it probably would be more useful to us if you bunged us the odd half-million rather than helping out in your leisure time, but, for most of us, volunteering is a way to give the charity a cash equivalent we couldn't afford to donate as actual money from our wages.

Our shops illustrate how this works: we need some paid staff to ensure we can open regularly at the times customers expect, but if all the work involved in running a shop had to be done by paid staff the profit available to use for animals would be minimal, if not non-existant — probably around the 5% received by charities who don't have shops, but get a percentage from commercial "charity bag" collections.

Fundamentally, money is a way of storing the value of work. Whether you do the work directly or donate it as cash, cat food or saleable items, we need your help.

Please visit our shops at 61 Burleigh Street, Cambridge, 10a Market Street, Newmarket, or 188 Mill Road, Cambridge and give us your support.

Would you be more interested in flexible volunteering?

We realise most people are incredibly busy nowadays, and committing to turn up regularly may be a serious difficulty. 

Obviously our regular volunteers do have to skip sessions sometimes too when they need to fit in vets' appointments, holidays and so on (we're not slave drivers!)

If you think you can probably only manage to volunteer occasionally, there are still lots of useful things you can get involved with.

Shops

We need the regular volunteers to make it possible to stay open at the advertised times, but there are plenty of back-room tasks which can be started or stopped depending on the number of helpers available.

Behind the person at the till there is a busy team who sort, clean, price and shelve. If they can stack up plenty of items all priced and ready on days when many volunteers are available, one helper can keep up with the shelf-filling when we're short-staffed.

Extra helpers on a Sunday, when sales are comparatively slow, can really benefit the following weekdays by making it possible for Monday to open fully stocked and looking good.

RSPCA Week

We normally average over £20 per volunteer per hour for this collection, which comes round at the end of April each year. If you don't have time to do anything else in the year, just two hours volunteering would mean £40 we wouldn't otherwise have.

One-off stalls and events

Individual jumble, car-boot or table-top sales can raise useful amounts, although they need a fair bit of organisation and some way of transporting sales items.

Annual Dog Show

We need a team of people for the basic organisation, but there are plenty of useful things that can be done on the day itself if you don't have time to come to any pre-planning meetings.

If you might be interested, email info@rspca-cambridge.org.uk

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.

Redecorations at our Burleigh St shop

Alan trying to get the rails back straight!

We closed two hours early on Sunday so that the paint would be dry enough to put the rails back up on Monday. I looked in mid-morning today to take these photos and it's already a great improvement with beautiful, evenly-painted walls instead of all the marks and holes where fittings had been hung and moved.

Open on Tuesday as normal.

As always, we need donations of saleable stock to keep our till ringing.

Knitting Needles and Old Lace

(By littlenemo)

I have some permanent newsfeeds set to alert me to charity items that I ought to be aware of and there were three recent ones which caused me the proverbial sharp intake of breath:

• How on earth did no-one notice that things were a bit odd at the People's Opportunity to Work charity until two and a half million pounds had been siphoned off? 
• Health 'n Safety not exactly gone mad, but not improving anyone's well-being either. 
• I do think anyone putting together a charity's annual report should understand that whether or not the charity is a "going concern" is pretty important.

The charity shop piece is very unfortunate. Reading between the lines, I think what happened was that the parent charity (CRUK) became concerned that it could be liable if one of the volunteers was injured. Some health and safety breaches (for example fire safety) are strict liability offences, which means the charity could be fined very large amounts even if no-one was ever injured.

The most infuriating thing about it is that, very possibly, the volunteers were safer at the shop than if they were alone at home, simply because there would be people about if they had an accident or were taken ill.

All in all, it's a perfect example of why, on the one hand, volunteers do have to be reasonable about sticking to health and safety rules, and on the other, it doesn't really benefit anyone if those rules are complicated to a point where it's deemed impossible for any volunteer to cope without a paid manager always on the spot to enforce them.

There does seem to be some movement on this from the Health and Safety Executive, who are in the process of consulting on a new online tool for charity shop risk assessment. The new process looks  much simpler and no longer treats ordinary household cleaning agents as if they were dangerous industrial chemicals.

Please, if you volunteer for RSPCA Cambridge, do take notice of our health and safety instructions. Don't block fire exits and keep walkways free of hazards. And don't sell knitting needles to anyone under 25.

I don't want you to have to visit me in Holloway.

Actually I'm not very sure of the legal status of knitting needles and Google is almost silent on this. We're always told the needles must not be put out on the open shelves, but only sold from the secure cabinet. Ditto knives of any sort (which makes sense) and any other cutlery (presumably on the slippery slope principle that if it's teaspoons today it will be steak knives tomorrow.) 

Charity Shop opening date February 14th

We now have a date for the opening of our new charity shop in Newmarket. 

10A Market street will open for business on Monday 14th February. This will give the volunteers a chance to practice with the new tills during the relatively quiet weekday period ready (I do hope) for a really busy Saturday.

There will be staff and volunteers in the shop working on setting up from 29th January onwards and they will be more than delighted to take in donations of items for sale. Market street itself is pedestrianised, so if you are dropping off donations by car it would be best to contact us first for directions to the access road at the back of the shops. Email newmarket@rspca-cambridge.org.uk or phone 07766 502 032 (note that the location on Google maps correctly identifies the access road, but shows the back of the wrong shop.

If you are interested in volunteering in the shop, please download and complete our shops volunteers form and bring it with you. We need to keep a record of who to contact in an emergency and whether our volunteers have any health conditions which mean we need to make adjustments to their work patterns (for example avoiding standing for long periods).

Thank you to everyone who donated items to our shop yesterday

Just a quick thank you to everyone who dropped in donations to our Burleigh Street shop yesterday.

We're now opening Sundays 11 am — 4 pm, and so far it looks as though sales aren't huge, but it's a more convenient day for many people who want to donate items for sale.

Update on our shops

FINALLY our new shop at 10A Market Street in Newmarket is really close to opening. The shopfitters will be starting work this Monday and should be finished by the 30th of this month. Our projected opening date is 1st February, but it's possible this may slip a little depending on how long it takes us to put all the stock out and do final tidying up.

We will be installing some of the new "gift aid" tills which will make it possible for donors to gift aid the proceeds of sale of their donated items if they are UK tax payers. The way this works is that the donor fills in a short form when they leave donations and the items are bar coded so that their sale can be tracked through the till. When a gift-aided item is sold, we send off a letter to the donor letting them know how much was raised and checking that they still want to give it to the charity. Provided they are happy for us to keep the money, they need do nothing more and we send off a monthly claim to the inland revenue who will give us an amount equal to the tax that the donor paid on an equivalent sum of their normal income. The system also helps us track our stock as it means an automatic record is kept of donations coming in and sales going out. We plan to install the new tills in both the Burleigh Street and the Market Street shops.

If you've been to 61 Burleigh Street recently you'll have noticed that our staff and volunteers worked hard over the Christmas "break" to put in a new "books and media" section in the raised area that was previously used for storage. This has approximately quadrupled the existing shelf space for books, CDs, videos and DVD's while making room in the rest of the sales area for more clothes and other items.

We've done some rationalisation of the shelves at our second hand bookshop at 188 Mill road and it is now staffed entirely by volunteers for half of the week. We would like to say a very big thank-you to the volunteers for agreeing to take on this extra level of responsibility. It is VERY much appreciated and will make it possible to continue with this shop which is much loved, but unfortunately does not have sufficient trade to cover the wages of a full-time manager and still make a profit to be used for the welfare work of the branch.

Please visit our shops to support the volunteers and make all their hard work worthwhile.

We also need donations of anything saleable. We move stock between the shops, so please feel free to take items to whichever is most convenient for you.

Buy a mug and fund our animal welfare services for five minutes!

Photo mugs 

Dog design

Cat design

If you're searching for some inexpensive last-minute gifts, then look no further. 

These cute mugs featuring animals rehomed by the branch during the past year are available at our charity shops at 188 Mill Road and 61 Burleigh Street, at £4.75 each.

Every mug bought will make enough profit to run our  services for five minutes (so we need to sell a lot of mugs!)

If you live in Cambridge, please tell your friends.

While they're shopping for mugs they can also look out for some wonderful bargains and gift ideas in our Burleigh Street general charity shop and for a range of fascinating reading in our second hand bookshop at 188 Mill Road.

Novelty squirrel nutcrackers

Nutcracker

I don't know how effective this little chap is at cracking nuts, but he's very cute.

Recently donated to our Burleigh St. Charity shop.

Shops' Progress

Daily profit of our Burleigh Street shop

To get a feel for how we're doing I worked out the average daily profit for the Burleigh Street Shop over the past three months. August was pretty depressing, but this is probably only to be expected because it's the last month of real summer. Most people have got all the summer clothes they want until next year, but it's too early for them to feel like buying for the colder months.

Profit for the a month is now hovering round the £1,000 mark — enough to cover half of our usual bill for boarding animals until they can be rehomed or half the monthly cost of running our clinic. If we can get it up to £2,000 we can feel secure that the clinic is on a safe financial footing and hope that the future Newmarket shop will fund our animal boarding. Ultimately that should free the money raised by the bookshop to be used to pay for emergency help at private vets. 

Charity Shops Pt 2

So, now you have a shop, all kitted out with rails, hangers and shelves. You hope that people will start bringing in donations, and you will probably have done at least one collection so that you can open with a decent-looking amount of stock.

Customers are weirdly blind to new happenings on a familiar street. Even a year on people are still wandering into our 61 Burleigh Street shop in Cambridge and saying: "Ooh! I didn't know there was an RSPCA charity shop in Cambridge." There are people living on Mill Road who have never noticed our second hand bookshop at number 188 (after it's been there for 6 years!).

One of the reasons why I started this blog was to try to attract more publicity for our shops and other fundraising efforts. 

People don't look up—so the very nice signs above shop windows seem to be almost useless as a way of telling them we are here. So far the most effective signage seems to be A-boards (facing shoppers' direction of travel at roughly eye-level) and decals stuck at eye-level on the glass doors.

People no longer expect to push doors—and will conclude that a shop is either closed or being used as a display space to avoid the street looking full of boarded-up premises unless you keep its door open or install an automatic opening sensor system.

So, you achieve your initial target of selling roughly 100 items every day, around an average price of £3.50. Your  takings are £350 and you pat yourself on the back, BUT...

Around £200 of the £350 will be needed to pay rent, rates, staff wages, heat etc. Allowing for Sundays and bank holidays, you may hope to see a fairly steady £3,600 profit in a month. 

When you consider that our kennelling bill is at least £2,000 each month, veterinary services to our clinic average £6,000 and charges at private vets £2,000 you can see why we need several shops and must run them to make the maximum profit possible.

Charity Shops!

As there really seems to be light at the end of the tunnel for the proposed new shop in Newmarket I thought I would write something about the process of operating a charity shop from the point of view of a branch committee—there is a lot of frantic activity in the background and it is not simply a matter of finding an empty shop, paying some rent and moving in.

First find your shop:

Potential income from sales has to be balanced against costs, particularly rent. A smallish shop in a quiet area may cost about £11,000 in rent. Something similar in a busy shopping area may be more than three times as expensive, but may pay for itself by attracting a far greater number of shoppers. Very few people will make a special journey to a charity shop if there is nothing else in the location that they need to visit.

If you decide to go for a shop in a busy location you will need to achieve very high volume of sales to make it pay. It may be necessary to organise "trawling" (which is where you distribute collection bags one week and pick them up the next—filled with saleable donated items, you hope). To make a profit will need to sell at least 100 items daily; which will involve a hefty amount of physical work sorting donated goods, cleaning, pricing and putting out on the shop floor. Unless you can field at least two reasonably able-bodied volunteers six days a week it will be impossible to keep up without employing some paid staff. Even with the low sales volume at the old Newmarket shop it nearly finished off the two volunteers who wound up doing the bulk of donation processing in the evening and at weekends.

Once you settle on premises that seem suitable there will be protracted negotiations with the landlord's agent and solicitor. Their job is to get the best possible deal for their client—which means that, if they can persuade you to agree to take on expensive repairs or to ignore that suspicious stain on the ceiling, they will. You have to grit your teeth and rely on the experience and advice of your own solicitor and surveyor, and not let yourself be persuaded that being careful is unnecessary delay. Unlike a residential property commercial landlords have no obligation to pay for repairs unless this is specifically agreed in the terms of the lease.

The amounts of money involved are pretty scary: shop rent is typically paid three months in advance, so for a £20,000 annual rent £5,000 must be found up front. Many landlords will require another three months' rent as a deposit. Unless the shop is already equipped with suitable rails and shelving, there will be at least another £10,000 to pay for fitting out, so £20,000 may have been spent before the shop even opens.

Once you have an agreed lease, two committee members must sign it as "holding trustees". This means they agree to take responsibility for ensuring that the rent is paid and the terms of the lease adhered to. A shop lease is not like an ordinary tenancy of a flat or house—if things don't work out the charity can't simply give a month's notice and leave. I've been one of the holding trustees for three of our branch shops so far, and am not yet bankrupt, but none of this is something to do lightly.

The major attraction of shops is their potential for generating regular income that can be increased by simply working harder. Virtually all other sources of income are at the mercy of the whims of public opinion.

Trial Leaflet Drop

One of our neighbouring branches had success in recruiting shop volunteers (and publicising the shop to get more customers) by distributing leaflets to houses in the streets immediately adjacent to the shop. 

The reasoning behind this is that these are the people who would have the fewest practical difficulties getting to the shop to volunteer for a few hours, whereas someone who had a long bus journey or needed to find car parking, would have much more trouble just getting to the shop.

I put out about 150 leaflets on Sunday afternoon and it will be interesting to see what results we get (if any). Plain black and white laser-printed leaflets are very cheap to do (less than 2.5 p each), so if it's successful this may be the way to go to advertise our shops in a targeted way.

Our shops and our animal welfare work

Our 2nd hand bookshop at 188 Mill Road

Some of the comments from visitors to our shops over the weekend made me realise many people don't really know how our fundraising activities relate to what we do locally to help animals.

All the profits from our shops (after we've paid the rent, rates etc.) go to pay the costs of running our animal clinic, providing care for animals that we've had to take in and other work to help animals in the local region.

We need to raise this money because there is no government funding to pay for the work we do.

At the end of each day, the staff and volunteers count up the shop's takings and pay them into the branch bank account. This money is then available to pay bills, such as the charges for boarding animals in kennels before rehoming and from vets for treating injured and sick animals. Fees paid by clinic users are paid into the same bank account and go towards paying the University's charge for providing qualified vets to treat animals at the clinic. We pay roughly half their charges using money we've raised by fund-raising activities such as our shops, and the clinic fees pay the other half. Periodically they send me their bills and I make out cheques to pay them. These are then counter-signed by a second member of the branch committee and posted off to the vets and kennels. I enter up the amounts in a spreadsheet to keep a record of how much we've spent each month and how low our funds are getting.

Last month we spent:

• £1,263 on boarding animals waiting to be rehomed
• £1,702 on veterinary treatments at private vets
• £13,786 on treatments at our clinic

Without the shops to pay part of the cost we would need to increase the clinic fees a lot and that would mean some of the very poorest pet owners probably couldn't afford to use it any more, so it is very important that they make enough profit to support the clinic.

The money we raise is also an essential lifeline for injured animals because it means that vets who have animals whose owner is unknown brought in to them can give at least some treatment rather than always putting them to sleep.

The money we raise isn't sent away to swell some "funds" elsewhere; it's used directly to provide help for animals locally.

Another action-packed Saturday, and not in a good way

Day started at 5.20 am with a call from a clinic client whose cat was in labour. At least she was responsible enough to have got the cat registered, so it was possible to ask one of the night-duty vets to give her an advice call back. Judging from my side of the call I think mother cat was probably OK, but I suspect the kitten she'd had trouble delivering probably had some kind of congenital malformation and didn't make it.

Usual morning routine of washing cat dishes and bleaching litter trays, then to the shops to do the banking and on to Arbury Court greengrocer's shop to exchange their collecting tin. THANK-YOU to all the customers and staff who fill it reliably as clockwork every three months!

The view heading towards Arbury over the river

Nearly there when the mobile went off with a caller who didn't know his dog was pregnant until she had puppies two days ago. Two of them had died in the meantime, and the bitch was now so poorly that he didn't think she'd survive the weekend without treatment. Considering that she must have been ill first thing, WHY couldn't he have phoned three hours earlier when our clinic would still have been open? Finally agreed to cover first aid at a private vet (which we'll try to get him to pay back) and told him to get her down to our clinic on Tuesday, if she survives.

Got into the greengrocer and it rang again; this time an elderly gentleman with equally elderly Westie who IS registered at the clinic and had had a fit. Took their details and asked for him to be given a call-back from one of the vets to discuss if she ought to be seen that day as an emergency. Life would be a lot easier if all pet owners were more like him. At least the people in the shop had an opportunity to see their donations in action.

Back for some lunch, then to the shop for the rest of the afternoon. Either Bettina or Anne has used her initiative and produced a home-made A-board to increase our visibility.

Busy putting out more donations to fill up gaps as items sell, but hampered by ongoing phone discussion about a mystery cat with a bad leg, which seems to have been signed over to us for rehoming, but nobody knows why or who authorised this. Unfortunately it looks as though it is definitely Our Problem, so Janine will arrange collection and transfer to the kennels. The bad leg has apparently improved with no treatment other than metacam (for pain and inflammation).

Pretty vase donated to the shop this week

Mistletoe on Saturday

This was the last of the donation of mistletoe and we'd sold out by mid-afternoon. Very many thanks to the imaginative donor for a fantastic addition to our Christmas fundraising.