Every year I probably donate and buy ~£150 worth of stuff in charity shops. At the moment I try and do this mostly via Oxfam, because TLYCS thinks they're decent, they have shops everywhere, and putting GiftAid on donations is easy once you've set up an account. In the past this number has been quite a bit higher, maybe like £300, and plausibly could go up again
Other shops that I see a lot like Cancer Research UK or British Heart Foundation seem likely to be a lot less effective.
The amount of money involved makes me feel like spending a lot of time thinking about this isn't really worth it. But I wondered if I'm missing something obvious. Are there more effective charities that run shops in the UK, or some other way I can donate items to more effective charities? For higher ticket items I sometimes sell on eBay as you can donate the proceeds directly to a charity, saving fees and potentially increasing awareness of say AMF to whoever buys the thing. But for a pile of not valuable paperbacks or something this doesn't always seem worth the time
I think it's commendable that you shop at charity shops and donate proceeds from selling items, and that you're thinking about their effectiveness. I think these charities that run shops in the UK are unlikely to rank highly on cost-effectiveness because they probably score quite low on the Neglectedness aspect (they're recognisable brands, which means that more people are likely to know them and therefore donate to them), and a lot of these charities do local community work (and therefore tends to be less cost-effective than funding charity work overseas).
My approach when I buy clothes and other stuff from charity shops is mostly to reduce the harm from buying this stuff new rather than to contribute to a specific charity. Interested in your thoughts!
Yeah that's my motivation mainly--to reduce harm of new stuff, but given prices are broadly similar it seems worth buying from them (if convenient and the charity has some benefit in expectation) rather than other people on gumtree / ebay etc
It seems likely to me that Oxfam would be quite a bit more effective than a shop supporting local community work