Charity shopping online – Freddy’s blog – Week 2 of 6

06/08/2021 08:36

With the first week of planning and preparation now complete, this second week saw me jumping straight into action. With my work at the CRA concentrating on promotion of the ‘Find an e-shop’ page – an invaluable resource acting as a directory for dozens of charity retailers’ e-commerce pages – I began my week with a meeting with the page sponsor, Shopiago.

Meeting the sponsor
While I had briefly come across Shopiago during my first week research, the meeting gave me a much more valuable insight into ‘who they are’ and ‘what they do’. Beginning with a crash course history of the company, I was shown how they work to help make e-commerce for charities more efficient (noting how closely it related to the work I am doing in this project) before going on to discuss how they would be able to aid me in my project and vice versa. With Shopiago as a sponsor, it made sense to work together towards the shared goal of promoting the page.

CRA member engagement
After the meeting, I got to work on promotional social media material for the ‘Find a charity e-shop’ page. Before I could begin promoting the page to the public, we had first decided to promote it back to the sector in an effort to develop the page further and get as many charity retailers on the list as possible…

… and if you are reading this and don’t currently have links to your e-commerce sites present on the page, please don’t hesitate to send them in to susan@charityretail.org.uk …

To this end I began the long and arduous process of making Facebook posts, Instagram infographics and, in the case of Twitter, figuring out how to succinctly get an important point across in only 140 characters. I was certainly happy with what I was able to produce and very quickly the research I had done during the first week came into play, as I was able to incorporate facts and figures into my posts. One such figure being that 70% of charity retailers are currently selling online, was good enough to make a reappearance as part of a quote in Charity Retail Events (if you’ll allow me to pat myself on the back).

Back to St Elizabeth’s Centre
As the week continued, I turned my attention back towards St Elizabeth’s Centre with an eye towards aiding their current e-commerce practices. Again, my first week research proved invaluable as I noted small changes that could aid visibility and search engine optimisation (a concept I was blissfully unaware of only a few weeks ago). I was on a roll and thought that nothing could stop me until I was hit by an unforeseeable technical issue (the horror). Even despite this (and with a little bit of amateur IT work) I was able to identify a number of areas that I feel I will be able to help in. As I now move into the third week of the project my focus for St Elizabeth’s now turns from identify problems to implementing solutions while for the CRA I’m beginning to look away from promoting the ‘Find a charity e-shop’ to the sector and towards promoting it to the public.

In case you missed it, here’s Week 1’s post