Freegle (www.ilovefreegle.org) is online dating for stuff - we help people get rid of stuff they don’t need, and find stuff they do, by connecting them with someone nearby - all for free.  This year we won eBay’s Favourite Charity competition, and here are our tips on how we did it.  

Isn’t it a bit odd to give away your winning secrets?  Perhaps - but we’re all about giving things away.  So we’re kind of obliged to...

You might not expect us to win.  Nobody dies if we don’t.  We don’t deal with life-threatening illness, or animals, or clean drinking water.  We have lovely stories about helping people, like the big old TV that went to someone with Alzheimer’s who couldn’t get to grips with a new flat-screen one - but frankly, we’re rarely most people’s first choice.  Fair enough.

Plus we have an annual budget of about £30,000, stretched to cover 2.6 million members all across the UK.  So we run on a shoestring...actually we’re saving up for a shoestring. It’s just not an option for us to invest money to recoup money.  We did a small experiment with Facebook ads, but each click cost £0.63.  We begrudge that, and we can’t afford it anyway.

So how did we do it?  Here are our Top 10 Tips.

1. Hit the ground running.  Last year we only really got going partway through and came second - so we knew we had to crack on.

2. Track it.  This year eBay’s leaderboard only updated about twice over the whole month - very frustrating if you want to see whether what you’re doing is working.  If you don’t measure something, does it really exist?  Our pet geek wrote some code to graph our progress - so that we could see what worked, what didn’t, and adapt.

3. Make it easy.  Lots of online competitions have multiple steps, or small buttons drowning in an ocean of bright colours.  A proportion of your supporters will get lost.  If you’re tech savvy, you can probably figure out a better link to give people.

4. Don’t pin your hopes on somehow going viral.  You won’t - you’re not a puppy juggling kittens.  Slow and steady does it - which is why you start early.

5. Use your existing interactions with your supporters.  We had an advantage here, because our members use our website, and we send a million emails a day, many of which even get read.  The click rate for email footers is low, but over time it adds up.

6. Volunteers are amazing.  We have around 1,000 across the UK.  That’s a lot of people’s arms they can twist to vote.

7. Appeal to your supporters.   Obviously.  Not too much; that’s annoying.  Vary it.  So we sent about an email a week to each supporter over the month - a mixture of appeals from named local volunteers, and a general appeal from “Freegle Towers”.

8 ...not just by email.  What other ways can you reach people?  If you have a Facebook app, you can send notifications.  Think outside the inbox.

9. Record what you do.  Because next year you want to...see item 1.

10 But the really crucial thing is...ah, that would be telling!

Now if your budget is bigger than ours, please forget all this.  We’ll see you next year.