No. Your donations go into our hub and then we deliver to our charities in a sequential and regular way dropping off the donations we have in the system at the time to those partners who are currently accepting donations. We carefully track the proportion of nominations going to each charity, ensuring that, over time, each receives the exact number of donations that it was nominated. However they will not be exactly the same physical bags and boxes. Why do we do it like this? To provide a door to door charity nomination service would be prohibitively expensive - or charities would already be doing this. Our service ensures the next best thing. We are careful not to sort or rank our donations received in any way. So, although the exact donations that reach the shop of your choice are different, the shuffling process is entirely random meaning every time you nominate a charity for your collection, that charity receives a donation, and there is no variance in overall average donation quality expected.

We understand that our donors feel a strong commitment to their nominated charities. However, to deliver every donation to each individual nominated charity on a daily basis would cost so much that we believe our donors would think twice - resulting in more non-donations, things going to the tip, or donations being left outside charities where they are unwanted. To provide a service that benefits the chosen charities but finds sufficient efficiencies to be cost effective we need to pick up and drop off in as consolidated a way as possible. To achieve this, we do bulk drop-offs and cycle through local charities in a repeating way. In order to ensure fairness and represent the intended support we ensure that donations are distributed to our partner charities in exactly the same proportions as those charities are nominated. For example, if we take donations 20 donations a night, over 5 nights during a week (100 total donations) and if those donors nominate charities in the following way: 40% of households nominate charity 1 30% nominate charity 2 20% nominate charity 3 10% nominate charity 4 Then the following week we would guarantee delivery of 40 donations to charity 1, 30 to charity 2, 20 to charity 3, 10 to charity 4. These would not be the exact same gifts - but they would be given in the same proportion. We are careful to maintain the randomness of the selection so that there are no variations in quality due to the position in the drop-off cycle. This is constantly under review and we work closely with our partner charities collecting regular feedback. This method allows us to make single 'bulk' deliveries to charities, reducing our transport overheads.

The following items should not be included: (We cannot inspect your donation so please ensure it contains none of the following) - Food items or anything biodegradable - Opened makeup - Rubbish or items that would be deemed unsellable by a reasonable person

We ask that when booking a collection, you have no more than 2 bin sacks or tote sacks of items for collection. Our drivers work alone and need to be able to collect from your door in one journey for us to be able to cover our costs. So please ensure that your collection can be safely carried by a reasonably fit adult and is sensibly and safely packed with ease of grip. We will be as accommodating as we can but we will not be able to take excess donations. Should you wish to have more items collected then please increase the number of collections you are booking (ie if you have 4 sacks, please purchase 2 collections) IMPORTANT - We cannot take boxes beyond what can be safely carried in one journey (if it is boxed, this is likely to be less than can be managed in bags with a good grip and safe handles. - We cannot return any boxes or packaging to you after collection OK: Not OK: - Splitting bags - Bags containing sharp items - Insufficiently strong bags

Short answer: you don't have to. You are free to drop of your donations, at no cost to you, to the charity of your choice. Longer answer: our service is for those who would like to make donations to local charity shops but can't get to it and are willing to pay us to solve this problem. For us to provide this service, we have to incur costs. Whilst you may wonder why the charities themselves do not cover the costs of collection, unfortunately there is no guarantee around the quality of donations and, with no cost to the public, regrettably this could result in our service being abused as a free junk clearance service - incurring a cost to charities for receiving unsaleable items. Your payment covers an efficient, not-for-profit service that provides local jobs and provides a transparent and ethical way for local charities to access much needed items that busy members of the community have in their homes but cannot easily arrange to drop off.

No. The Charity Collection Service is a not for profit organisation. That means that we run similarly to a business and have to cover our costs, but we are not seeking to take extra margin so as to return a profit at the end of the year. Any 'profits' that do result from our operations (predicting exact costs over a year is an inexact process) are distributed out to our partner charities in the same support weighting as the nominations made by our donors.