Charity shopping online – Freddy’s blog – Week 4
22/08/2021 16:43
With the fourth week of my internship at the CRA having come to a close, I am certainly entering the home stretch, and I’m starting to see many of the successful impacts of my previous weeks’ work.
Where the focus of the third week was producing a press release and disseminating it among broadsheets and trade papers, this week saw me change my focus towards lifestyle media and blogs, to admittedly varying levels of success. I knew this would be very hit-and-miss, and unfortunately it turned out to be rather more miss than hit. By the end of the week, I had received no response from many of the outlets I had reached out to. Yet it wasn’t a complete failure, and I’m still in ongoing discussions with a few outlets with an eye to producing articles (hopefully) sometime next week.
Here’s a little request – if any of you reading this would like to adapt the press release we issued last week – which led to this Guardian article – for your own needs and to promote your own ecommerce activity through local or national press – please do contact me via Susan at the CRA – susan@charityretail.org.uk.
This week I also found out about the impact my work has had so far. For one, since the beginning of my internship, ten new e-shops have been added to Find a charity e-shop. On top of this, since last week’s successful press release roll out, Find a charity e-shop shot up from being the CRA’s 11th most visited page all the way to number 1 (!!!). Clearly, I’ve been doing something right.
Beyond my work with the CRA, my other main task this week was researching as many online selling platforms as possible with an aim to better understanding their respective advantages and disadvantages and see which ones would be most appropriate for use by St Elizabeth’s Centre.
Now, to say that there are dozens upon dozens of online selling platforms is an understatement. Online today, there are countless online selling platforms all attempting to provide a different service (to varying degrees of success) and it was certainly not easy to sift through them all in an effort to find the crème de la crème. This process was helped, however, by our old friends at Shopiago and following a meeting, and a lot of independent research, I felt by the end of the week that I had got a handle on what platforms would (and wouldn’t) work.
As I now move into my fifth, and penultimate (!), week I aim to finish my blog and lifestyle media outreach, with next week hopefully proving more successful than this week, as well as beginning to think about how to produce a hand over document and what to include in my post-project write up (how the time flies). Simultaneously I will be feeding back to St Elizabeth’s regarding online selling platforms and (fingers crossed) leave them with a better online selling presence than when I found them, with a lot of progress already having been made in this regard. Here’s to a great last two weeks.
Freddy