Trash or treasure: Do you know the difference?

A tsunami of unusable donations is overwhelming Australian charity shops. Can a clever social marketing campaign change donor behaviours and solve the problem?

William Holmes

When it comes to charity stores and bins, would you consider yourself a champion donor?

Unlike the garden variety donor – who takes items to charity stores that may be of no use to anyone else – the champion donor considers what it is they’re donating. They judge whether the item is in appropriate condition, and check all the parts are present and working.

While the champion donor is not contributing to the 60,000 tonnes of unusable product that overwhelms many of Australia’s 2,500 charity shops each year, the same can’t be said of the standard donor, who despite their best intentions may be unwittingly contributing to that pile of time-wasting, money-chewing “goods”. And these donations place the shops, which are often run by volunteers on a tight budget, under enormous pressure.

Reducing the amount of unusable donations collected at these drop-off areas has been a long-term goal of the organisations that run op-shops, but measures such as surveillance and fines have not stopped the problem.

While about 40% of people are champion donors, around half of all donors don’t understand what goods can be used by charities. The remainder, about 10%, know that they are dumping junk, but don’t care.

A project team headed by professor Sharyn Rundle-Thiele from Griffith Business School is testing social marketing approaches to changing donating behaviours, and charity donation areas could be in for a major overhaul as part of their three-year field trial aimed at improving the quality of goods handed over at drop-off points.

The team at Griffith has secured a $347,153 ARC Linkage Grant to run the project, which is described by Terry O’Neill, vice president of the peak body for charity shop organisations NACRO, as “the best thing to happen to the sector for a long time”.

“We want the charities to be able to spend all of their money on delivering the service and less on sorting,” says professor Rundle-Thiele. “If one-third of what’s being given to them is unusable, that is a lot of expense going into getting that revenue stream in the first place. We could help change that.”

Mr O’Neill, who is a member of the project team, said research shows people need more guidance.

“The existing approach to reducing illegal dumping, surveillance and fines, hasn’t worked,” he said. “It hasn’t prevented large amounts of unusable goods being placed at donation bins. Overwhelmingly, what we have found there is a lack of understanding. People don’t know what’s good and what’s bad, or what goods are acceptable and what are not.”

The project team is undertaking three “postcode-level” trials in what is known as social marketing, which is a form of marketing that aims to change people’s behaviour to benefit the whole of society.