More funds, less friction: AI’s role in charity shops
Smoothing the ‘five coats, four mugs and a microwave’ challenge
Artificial intelligence is smoothing the volunteer experience and boosting fundraising efforts at the British Heart Foundation.
Technology has been a massive boon for high street retailers like Zara and H&M, which are using automation to reach new levels of efficiency. It’s been a different story for charity shops – but British Heart Foundation CTO Alex Duncan wants to change that.
“[High street retail stores] know exactly the stock they're going to get in on a day-by-day basis, so they know what they're going to be selling. For us, we have no idea what stock we're going to get in.
“You could come into one of your local stores and donate a duvet cover and three plates. I could go in and donate five coats, four mugs and a microwave. Who knows? And so you can't get those efficiencies around automation that you do where you can predict exactly what you're going to get.”
The BHF runs 700 stories nationwide, a vital part of the charity’s fundraising efforts: taken alone, the retail business would be equivalent to a FTSE 350 firm. With volunteers – most of whom, post-Covid, are under 50 – making up the majority of retail staff, ensuring their experience is smooth is essential.
“If they don't like the working environment, they'll just go somewhere else and donate their time, so the dynamic is quite different [to private companies].”
AI meets altruism
AI is proving important in changing how volunteers work at BHF. As one example, it is helping to remove time spent on the manual decision-making.
“We've obviously got in-store, but we’re also the largest charity retailer on eBay in the world; I think at any one time we've got about 10,000 products live on eBay.
“Making that decision about whether we sell my microwave in the store or on eBay, there's a lot of decision-making that goes into that.”
Today the process is very manual, but with the new system volunteers can take a photo and categorise a donation using image recognition to decide where to sell it.
“For me that's the really exciting piece. It will improve the volunteer experience because they're spending less time with lots and lots of drop downs going, ‘Yes, it's an electrical appliance; yes, it's in the kitchen; yes, it's a microwave; yes, it's grey,’ when image recognition can do all of that for you now.”
The result, which is being rolled out across the retail estate now, is a “drastic” saving in time and cost, as well as a direct boost to BHF’s income by choosing the most appropriate channel.
While BHF’s tech stack is mostly based on Microsoft technology, this AI tool was developed in-house. That’s a microcosm of the wider transformation programme going on at the charity, which is “a mix of off the shelf technology and some homegrown or home-built stuff, where we feel it really adds value or where it's our USP.”
Image recognition is only one example; BHF treated 2024 as a “test-and-learn year” experimenting with new approaches to AI. They include image generation for marketing and helpline assistance for nurses, “so they can spend more time actually talking to you rather than searching for exactly the right advice.”
But, while the charity knows there is “tons of opportunity” in AI, it's also aware the technology is “not the silver bullet everyone thought it was going to be.”
BHF has created a team to evaluate AI from both a risk and an opportunity perspective, to make sure it supports the charity’s “huge” growth ambitions – all in aid of raising more money to fund lifesaving research.
“We want to make sure that cardiovascular disease is funded appropriately for the amount of burden it causes on the NHS and on people... We've got growth plans, and the only way that we're going to do that is through using technology.”
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