Steve Fosdick wrote:
Sorry I don't have any software suggestions but on the subject of getting it done properly my experience is that the bags are generally thrown into our side garden (where the "front" door is) rather than put through the letterbox and specify only a day of the week for collection rather than a date.
The result is we never know how long a bag has been sitting in the garden before we found it and if it was put out and not collected we would not know if this was because we had already missed the collection day or the collectors had not turned up.
I have a meeting with the people who do the deliveries so I'll raise this point.
Those limitation make the system essentially useless for us even before taking account of how, for many of these schemes, the charity in whose name the whole thing is done receives a relatively small proportion of the proceeds of selling what is donated.
This is a different issue entirely and I do agree with you; it should be made clear what proportion of sale value of goods goes to the charity.
I'm not naive; I understand that too few people volunteer these days and even for entirely voluntary setups there are costs (the bags, leaflets, etc). But knowing what the charity makes is still important.
I long ago started boycotting charity Christmas cards because so little goes to charity; I buy cheap (eg) supermarket cards and give the money I save to a charity I know will make good use of the money. But I have no idea what value a charity gets from a bag of goods collected from the house compared, for example, with the same goods delivered to a charity shop, or with me selling the goods on eBay and giving them the money (the last option being more theoretical because if I could be bothered to flog it on eBay I'd probably be less altruistic about what I did with the money I raised!)