About
Our impact
We have not collected our first donation, so we have no results to show you. What we can show you is exactly what we will count, and how.
Why there are no numbers here
Most organisations in this sector publish a number on day one — an estimated value of goods, a projected diversion figure, a per-item equivalence. Those numbers are almost always modelled rather than counted, and once published they are very hard to correct.
We would rather this page be empty for a while and then be true.
What we will count
Each of these comes from our own records — an intake log, a sale, a transfer — not from a model.
- Goods collected
- Counted at intake, by category and by donation. This is a count of things we physically received.
- Goods reused
- Anything that leaves us to be used again — sold, or given directly to someone who needs it.
- Goods sold
- Units sold, by channel, with what each actually settled for.
- Goods distributed directly
- Given to a person or a program rather than sold. Counted separately because it raises no money and still does good.
- Goods recycled
- Sent to textile or materials recyclers rather than landfill.
- Gross revenue
- What buyers paid, before anything is deducted.
- Marketplace and payment fees
- What the channel took. Published, not netted off silently.
- Pickup and processing costs
- Fuel, crew, disposal. The unglamorous half of the arithmetic.
- Net proceeds
- Gross revenue minus every cost above. This is the only figure that can honestly be called what a donation raised.
- Funds allocated
- What was transferred to charitable work, and to which programs.
What will be an estimate, and labelled as one
- Waste diverted
- Weight is not measured at every stage in a small operation. Where we report diversion it will be labelled as an estimate with the method shown.
- Environmental effect
- Converting diverted weight into emissions avoided depends on assumptions we did not make ourselves. If we publish it, we will name the source and the assumption.
How it will be published
- Broken down by location, campaign, partner and period — so a school that ran a drive can see what their drive did, not just what the organisation did.
- With costs shown, not deducted quietly. Gross revenue on its own overstates what reached the work.
- Every figure traceable back to specific records. If we cannot trace it, we will not print it.
- Corrections published when we get something wrong, rather than quietly edited.
One thing we will never do is put a dollar value on what you personally donated. That is yours to determine and worth asking a tax professional about — our donation and receipt policy explains why.