AGM Board Annual Report 2023

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FREEGLE LIMITED ANNUAL REPORT 2023

DIRECTORS’ REPORT

We’re still here! We say this each year, but it’s an enormous achievement for us simply to keep going, as the tech world continues to evolve and so many organisations fall by the wayside.

Our levels of activity are broadly similar to last year - around 80,000 OFFERs or WANTEDs a month. This is slightly below 2021, when we benefited (unlike many) from a COVID boost. We’re noticeably busier than in pre-COVID times.

But simply focusing on keeping going in the short term is a recipe for not keeping going in the long term. How many of us could answer the question “What is Freegle aiming to achieve over the next year?”. We still struggle with having clear aims for the next year, having a plan to achieve those aims, and actually executing that plan.

That might be fine if the UK was reusing everything it needed to and nobody was struggling to find things they need or declutter without waste. But it isn’t.

Our focus this year therefore needs to be on building organisational capacity. That means: volunteers, income, contacts. But over this next year we will be adding some capacity:

  • A very part-time person to help with general admin and keeping things moving.
  • Trialling an external web development firm in Georgia to add geek capacity.
  • Trying to boost our advertising revenue.

This is hard work, and there’s a chicken and egg issue - where do we find the capacity to do the work to build capacity? If each of us volunteers recruited another volunteer this year - even if we don’t think we need them - then we’d be a long way towards having the capacity we need to get stuff done over this coming year.

GOVERNANCE

Legal Structure

Freegle is an Industrial and Provident society, and full details of our registration are at Mutuals Public Register: Freegle Limited. Our Rules are at Rules. Freegle is also registered as a charity with HMRC (ref. XT32865).

The Society’s membership during the year was as follows:

  • Members at the beginning of the year 156
  • Members ceased during the year 6
  • Members admitted during the year 14
  • Members at the end of the year 164

All volunteers are eligible to become Members, and the Board encourages people to do so. Members are eligible for a free copy of Microsoft Office Professional.

Directors

The Board has held regular meetings. All minutes can be accessed at Freegle_Board_Minutes. Meetings are open to volunteers, with access details to the meeting being published on the Central group.

Elected Directors serving on the Board this past year:

  • Cat Fletcher
  • Dr David Greenfield
  • Edward Hibbert
  • Craig Hilton
  • Mike Jury
  • Mike Paterson
  • Penny Townsend
  • Jen Williams
  • Ruth Willmore

Freegle has the following Director roles:

  • Chair - Edward Hibbert
  • Company Secretary - Mike Jury
  • Finance Director - Craig Hilton
  • Head of Media - Cat Fletcher. Cat is also contracted by Freegle for national publicity and social media work.
  • Chief Technology Officer - Edward Hibbert. Edward is also contracted by Freegle for maintenance and development of our IT platform.
  • Fundraising - Edward Hibbert
Appointed Roles

The Board is grateful to people currently in the following appointed roles:

  • Treasurer - Jane Loveday
  • Assistant Treasurer - Jacky Barrett
  • Returning Officers - Alison Redway, Jacky Barrett
  • Ombudsman - Jeni Mason, Kim Hiscock (replacing Kathy Stanley-Quist in March 2023)

TEAMS

The invaluable work done by local volunteers is supported by a number of national teams. The Board is very grateful to people who volunteer with these teams, and encourages other local volunteers to do so if they are able.

New Groups

The Freegle New Groups Team currently has 7 active members; Derek, Jo, Melissa, Ray, Roger, Saira and Stuart; none of us are quite as active as we’d like to be. We will always welcome anyone that wants to join us, please contact us at newgroups@ilovefreegle.org.

Over the last year we’ve lost May, Mo, Ruth and Susana who now have other commitments, we wish them well and would welcome them back at any time.

May and Melissa joined the group originally to help sort out the general mess that was our filing system and also better organise the email account. They’ve done a great job.

From 31st August 2022 to 11th August 2023 we closed 12 cases.

1 required no further action as the applicant did not reply to emails 1 entirely new group was launched 1 group was created to replace a disaffiliated group 9 groups had a change of name or core area There are currently no open cases.

Fewer requests for new groups to be formed have meant it has been a quieter year than usual.

We had 16 requests to start a group that didn’t amount to anything - we know that groups do best when there is a local admin team with ”boots on the ground” and people often shy away when asked if they will help us to run a group. One person completed the application form and started the process but then stopped replying to emails.

We had 4 requests for overseas groups from Nigeria, Kenya, India and the USA.

There have been quite a few changes of group names, some leaving greencycle/recycle/free2go type names behind and adopting “Freegle” which is great, and some following input from the local council. Please get in touch if you don’t have Freegle in your community name and would like to.

We’ve also helped to tweak some core areas, and adjusted a few incorrectly mapped DPAs.

Derek recently approached Dorset council regarding some publicity on their website, they had previously been approached by Natalie and this was well received. This might be something we would be able to do more in the future if time allows.

All in all, it’s been a reasonable year.

Geeks

The geeks keep our IT systems running. Currently we have two part-time paid contractors:

  • Edward Hibbert (develops the software, and does most of the system admin work).
  • Chris Cant (mobile app, other sysadmin, wiki and Discourse).

In the last year we have also had a little voluntary help from:

  • Clement Lee, on statistics.

We have moved our hosting from Bytemark, who served us well for many years, to the Katapult platform run by Krystal. This was all a bit stressful, but went relatively smoothly and is a better place for us to be long term. We still have a little hosting on Mythic Beasts, which is unchanged.

This year we have continued a refresh of our core technology:

  • We’ve upgraded the Freegle site from Nuxt 2 / Vue 2 to Nuxt 3 / Vue 3.
  • The Freegle mobile app has been updated similarly; the ModTools app will require updating when the ModTools website is updated.
  • We’ve added a fast server for reading data, implemented in the Go programming language.
  • We still need to update the look and feel for our mobile application - we’ve not made much progress on that this year.

Our dependence on too few people remains a problem. We have been talking to a suitable web development firm in Georgia to see if we can outsource some of the more routine work. This costs money, and therefore increases the pressure on fundraising.

There are 402 volunteers registered on the Discourse national discussion groups, with about 400-1000 posts per month. The wiki is also kept updated and is still regularly used.

We are very grateful for all the volunteers who contribute on the Tech group - reporting problems, making suggestions, and testing changes.

Media

Cat represented Freegle for 140 days during the past year by managing social media (100,000 followers, reaching ~1 million over the year).

AND

Attended over 50 events, meetings or conferences in person or virtually either as a host, speaker, expert, organiser or consultant – where others seek out ‘reuse’ expertise from Freegle.

Cat runs a weekly Freegle Free Shop in central Brighton. It is the only permanent Free Shop in UK and is a vehicle for promoting Freegle on a high street. (NOT part of paid Freegle work but relevant non the less) https://www.ilovefreegle.org/communityevent/161677

Media Output

Social Media Facebook @Freegle https://www.facebook.com/Freegle
84,818 like up 1,502 from 83,316 over past 12 months (30 per week – could be better!)
Our FB reach was 887,276 over past year and over 17,000 new profile visits.
We continue to share aligned campaigns, programmes and stories of interest along with earnest content to encourage less waste and more reuse. But the most successful (popular) posts are funny rather than ‘worthy’. Which is why you’ll see some odd posts from time to time – to boost our reach and engagement from viewers.

Twitter @thisisfreegle https://twitter.com/thisisfreegle
Twitter is dead. It is called “X” now. It is no longer a highly valuable platform for us although we still post and share on X as many local authorities still use X a lot to inform and inspire behaviour change, and it is an easy way for us to share local council’s campaigns. So, it is a PR tool we still use but with less joy and sadly less impact.

I had no joy finding help with TikTok but this is now a priority given the demise of Twitter.

Instagram @thisisfreegle https://www.instagram.com/thisisfreegle/
We have tripled our followers in past year to almost 1,000. More focus on Instagram in coming year.

Events and meetings attended – virtual and in person:

  • Attended various events in London and Sussex
  • Blueprint Circular Economy closing Summit. North London Waste Authority Upcycling community event in Enfield. Festival Circular Economy (virtual), University of Brighton/Sussex University research and Circular Economy projects and steering groups.
  • Contributed to 4 pieces of academic research (community waste prevention, circular economy, digital platforms). This one from previous years was published recently https://www.saraskarp.com/community-waste-movement
  • Held a pilot School Freegle event (March 2023) https://www.ourcityourworld.co.uk/news/freegle-event-at-cardinal-newman/
  • Met with officers at Lewes Prison discuss options of how Freegle could ‘work’ with prisons. Ongoing.
  • Discussions with Bryson’s (Wales waste management company) on how to incorporate Freegle at Tips. Meeting in person at RWM in Sept 2023 https://www.brysonrecycling.org/
  • Met with MP Caroline Lucas. To cement ongoing support for reuse in Westminster. Have organised a visit for her to Reuse depot in Manchester (Freegle contributed to the planning it https://recycleforgreatermanchester.com/renew/); have shared Freegle stats with her and will be contributing to Green Party conference next month.
  • Attempting to meet with Angela Rayner (Labour) who visits Brighton a lot and knows about Freegle because of my local profile. Ongoing piece of work – to ensure higher profile for reuse in national manifestos (national elections are coming in 2024).
  • Invited to be judge at UN’s Sustainability Film Festival https://bigsyn.org/
  • Continue to be a judge for annual People & Environment Awards https://www.peaawards.com/judges/

Free Shop

The best thing about this weekly event is having conversations with people outside of our ‘bubble’ – able to promote freegling to a whole new audience, including many non-locals (visitors from elsewhere in UK). From May 2022-23, 85 Free Shops were run, 24,928 attendees, 11.5 tonnes of donations received. 11.2 tonnes given away to be reused, requiring 680 hours volunteer time. 300kgs recycled. Since May the Free Shop is now every Friday and Saturday and averages 350 attendees and 200+kgs of donations per day. Cat is seeking sponsorship from Suez U.K for the Free Shop and to hopefully pilot in other areas in the coming year.

Did not Attend

  • Recycling and Waste Management Exhibition at NEC Birmingham -Sept 2022. I got COVID just before this event, so David Greenfield kindly delivered my presentation for Freegle.

But I will be attending in Sept 2023 and contributing to Suez stage and meeting with Brysons.

  • Construction Week Exhibition at NEC Birmingham-sept 2022 - Ditto
Social Media

After Facebook withdrew its permission for our usual app to be used by any moderator on Freegle, Edward has been able to install just one access app with the backup Facebook account of Amy Green. We have been able to help a large number of groups relink their Facebook pages back to groups by using this backup admin Amy so that they can share the daily publicity posts from Modtools. Amy needs to be an Admin on the local Facebook pages so that we can use the account to do the relink.

A number of groups have also contacted us at socialmedia@ilovefreegle.org to assist them with the relink of their group’s Twitter pages, We have managed to update and relink most of them but with the pages dating back to Yahoo days and the email addresses not being updated or changed to a Mods personal email address and the Mod then having left, it has not been easy to re-activate some of the Twitter pages and new ones have had to be created.

We do now store full login details for Twitter pages and also keep a record of who the Admins are for all the Facebook pages so that any future changes in Freegle Group ownership should not cause the same problems with the social media pages as it has done in the past.

We currently have over 450 Freegle groups on our list with over 300 of them having some kind of detail with an error recorded against them.

These errors could be as minor as a missing picture on the page through to the page being suspended or missing completely, with other things such as links broken or Yahoo mentions on the pages.

If any groups would like help to restore their social media pages to full capacity or if the owners would like to help us keep a register of the login details, please get in touch at socialmedia@ilovefreegle.org

Info mailbox

The info@ mailbox activity has been c.1500 chats, an increase of 50% since the same period last year - and last year had increased by 40% on the year before. These increases are mainly due to ‘thank you’ emails for donations. We send out personal mails to a range of donors - larger amounts received via Paypal, all cheques and bank transfers. and deal with gift aid requests and queries

We also field questions about a range of ‘non-technical’ things from members, volunteers and outside agencies and are the first line of contact for complaints.

Jacky, Angelika and Jools

Councils

We have continued to see increasing interest in reuse from councils this year with Cheltenham and Herefordshire looking to join as Partners and many others getting in touch to talk about what we do and how we can support them. Councils that have renewed their Partnership so far are Buckinghamshire, Lancaster and Newcastle-under-Lyme and we wait to hear from Norfolk, Essex and Lancashire.

Amongst improvements to what we offer councils, we have overhauled the presentation we give, updating the content and images. To better explain our services and the benefits of working with Freegle, we have produced three new documents which allow councils to explore opportunities for working with us:

What does Freegle do for councils?

  • Reuse impact for councils - a guide to working with Freegle
  • Freegle Councils - benefits for Partners
  • We have also been putting together an onboarding pack for Partners to try and engage them from the start.

Freegle Bites has continued to be popular and has generated several leads with councils looking to work more on reuse.

We have been working on our relationships with other organisations such as ReLondon, SUEZ and Material Focus with the hope that this could lead to more engagement in the future.

The councils’ website has been migrated to a new space which Natalie and Anna will be working through to update the content in the next few months.

Our biggest project this year has been through the London Borough of Wandsworth Cost of Living Fund for which we have been testing our theory that community notice boards could be a successful way of promoting Freegle, especially those that are classed as ‘hard to reach’. We contracted a student to find and place posters on as many notice boards as possible in the Borough. These have been mapped and we have been observing the initial data, which seems to be positive.

Looking into this year, we will be meeting soon to look at the councils project as a whole and agree on direction for the coming months. It is likely that we are going to focus on packaging up services to provide to councils.

Support Mailbox

This year there were 8300 messages to Support, 6000 of them spam reports.

The internet service providers spot messages marked as spam, and provide the originators with a feed back loop to let them see who is doing it.

Thanks to Christian, there is a procedure to see who marks a lot of Freegle mail as spam, and he asks them to stop. There aren’t many repeat offenders though, so the flow continues.

There were 262 non spam report messages to Support in the last month, excluding chats between ourselves, and thanks from satisfied users. So about 9 a day, a little up on last year.

18 were from Moderators who we are particularly happy to help, as it can be an isolated role.

There were two particular spikes in August this year.

The refresh of the underlying website technology generated unexpected consequences. One was that members’ messages appeared not to have been sent. So they sent another, which appeared not to have been sent, leading to repetition and frustration for some people for a few days.

The second was the retirement of the iPad’s operating system iOS 12.5.7. Who would have guessed that Freegle users use elderly software and don’t plan to change it.

At present we are recommending that they use a more current device if they have access to one, or trashnothing, which is still compatible.

We acknowledge, with many thanks, the assistance we get from Edward and Chris.

Angelika, Dee and Jacky

Chit Chat

We were pleased to welcome Melissa to the ChitChat team. We are continuing to moderate with a light touch, allowing conversation to flow and referring to ‘Offer/Wanted’ as needed. As a rule, we respond to every report with a thank you at the very least.

There have been one or two problem members, when a problem occurs we will remove a post and inform their local group and/or Support as required. But generally ChitChat has been fairly uneventful this year.

Sometimes members turn to ChitChat for advice on using Freegle. We are happy to help them if we can, or refer them to support or their local volunteers if more appropriate.

We’ve seen lots of members supporting each other, posting nice stories of things they have successfully Freegled. It’s always lovely when fellow moderators contribute so thank you to everyone who does. As always, if you need any help with ChitChat you can contact us directly or report any posts you’d like looked at (it’s useful if you add your info).

Wendy, Kim, Melissa

Mentors

The team consists of 9 members. Over the last 12 months we lost Terry, Christian, Cooky and Ruth but gained Jeni.

We continue to try to reduce the number of caretaker groups we are responsible for, the number currently standing at 50 which is slightly less than last year. In order to address the fact that we have a number of groups which had been held for a considerable amount of time we appointed a roving recruiter to concentrate on trying to attract new mods to these groups. We have had some success with this but it remains an uphill struggle to find, train and mentor new recruits. We are currently mentoring 6 of them, but as it takes a minimum of 6 months to bring a new recruit up to scratch and able to take on ownership of a group, it is a slow process.

We initiated a discussion about what to do with groups where there is virtually no traffic and an amended procedure outlining the process is awaiting Board approval. Only one of our current caretaker groups would meet the criteria at the present time.

Two groups were declared abandoned in the last 12 months. Thankfully most owners who wish to give up their groups do so in cooperation with the team. We continue to rely on the assistance of neighbouring groups to rehome some of these ‘orphans’. We also submit a monthly report to Central listing the caretaker groups and inviting applications to take any of them over. The direct approach seems, however, to be more successful. During the course of the year we acquired 12 new caretaker groups, 5 of which were rehomed fairly promptly.

The total number of rehomed groups was 19, a number of which was to newly trained owners.

As always we welcome new recruits to the team should anyone feel they might be able to help, particularly with mentoring.

Vee
Mentor team coordinator

Training

In the last 12 months the Training group has had 36 potential Volunteer Moderators start the training process of which 22 have successfully completed the training and gone on to become Moderators on groups all across the country.

There have been prospective trainees that did think it was just a case of getting a shortcut to new posts on the board but they were found out quickly and there were others that did not realise what was involved in being a Moderator on Freegle and they were among those that sadly did not complete the Training.

We like to think that all Trainees are given a good basic grounding in how to use Modtools and also to recognise the difference between a good post for the board and one that sadly might need to be rejected.

The Trainees are shown how to Edit a post that is in Pending so that if possible they can turn a bad post into a good one with just a slight alteration and they are also told that any changes to a member’s post must be related to the member on what they have done to the post and why.

Volunteer Support

The Central team of David and Kim help keep our main Discourse discussion forums running.

We check that members on our Forums are indeed Freegle Volunteers and offer help to anyone struggling using Discourse.

We would like to encourage more volunteers to join in on Discourse forums as there have been some useful discussions on how to get the best out of Modtools and how to participate in our fundraising campaigns (Currently there is a Paypal competition.)

There are frequent updates on any ongoing issues as well as opportunities to voice any opinions, ask questions and chat to others in the Freegle teams. You can access Discourse at the top of ModTools by tapping/clicking ‘Us’.

If you need any help please email us at volunteersupport@ilovefreegle.org

David and Kim

Spammer Checking

This team reviews reports of spammers and adds them to our list where appropriate. They have added about 360 spammers over the past year, which does a valuable job in protecting freeglers.

Ombudsman

We recruited 7 volunteers to serve on the Advisory Panel during the year to July 2023. They assisted in dealing with the two complaints received and we are grateful for their advice and contributions in concluding these.

The first complaint in March 2023 was from a member who wanted Freegle to ban any posts offering Knives and who felt this had not been dealt with properly by his group moderator. He accepted the decision not to impose a ban, disappointed but pleased we had recommended the strengthening of advice given to groups in the notes on Specific Items on the Freegle Wiki.

The second in May 2023 was from a member who had been banned for raising concerns about animal welfare and wanted her group to take action to remove animals from a member asking for assistance. Unfortunately the language became rather intemperate on both sides. We informed the complainant that we could not overturn the group ban on her membership and explained more fully that Freegle is not responsible for animal welfare matters. She accepted the decision but still repeated that we should do something about people owning animals if they could not afford to feed them. Some advice was given to the group on how they might have dealt with this differently to prevent escalation of the complaint. This has been rejected by the group moderators.

Jeni and Kim

Trustpilot Reviews

We have received only 8 reviews in the last year. One 5*, one 3*, one 2* and the other five 1*. All received replies.

The 3* review likes the idea of Freegle but has mixed views on how it operates as he never seems to get any of the items he requests. He would like it to be a rule that members have to wait 24 hours before offering an item to give everybody a chance. The 2* reviewer remarked that the majority of items on Freegle are not free as we state. He was asked to contact us with details of any items where he had been asked for money so that we could investigate this (no reply on Trustpilot).

The 1* reviews were very mixed. One complained about the fundraising Admin that we sent out as they refused to believe we needed so much money to run a website. One complained because they were not allowed to list something by local moderators, one was outraged to be asked for their postcode and felt threatened by local moderators, and another had something left out for collection taken by someone else. The other 1* was having a problem with requests for items that he had marked as Taken but which were still appearing on the listing; he was asked to contact his local moderators so this could be referred for investigation.

Freegle Cake

Each month this year, this project has delivered surprise cake as a thank you gift to a randomly selected Freegle Ltd member.

Any Freegle volunteer can become an official Member of Freegle Limited on paying a £1 subscription, which entitles them to a single share in the Company (and also to entry in the cake draw).

All entrants can note dietary requirements eg vegan, gluten free, non dairy, and we will request this from the baker at ordering.

The lucky recipient of cake is selected at random from the centrally held database of Freegle Ltd Members. Cake is ordered from a local cake maker and delivered to the member’s home. Wherever possible an independent local business is used, and an average monthly budget of £30 spent.

Feedback from recipients is excellent.

Stella, Freegle Malvern Hills.
Cakeist

WORKING GROUPS

Working groups are where we discuss how Freegle should run. We currently have a Funding Group, Development Group and Tech Group. All volunteers are welcome to join these groups and their remits are available on the Freegle Wiki.

The Board would like to express its thanks to the people who participate in those groups, and also the coordinators who keep them running.

Tech

Tech is the group for more technical queries, raising bugs, or discussion of how the site should behave. It is a crucial and valuable part of Freegle’s culture that we can discuss what we should and shouldn’t do. Sometimes we don’t all agree, and designing a website by committee is not an easy thing to do. But the end result is better for all of our involvement.

Development

Development Group has discussed the following since the 2022 AGM.

  • Task 106: The Equality and Diversity Policy was reviewed to see if it is still relevant. A small edit was made to make the document more inclusive and clarify breach reporting.
  • Task 127: The Abandoned Groups procedure was tweaked to accommodate missing owners.
  • Task 7: Outside local engagement in communities was discussed very briefly but we ran into the usual problem of our group thinking it should happen but having no ideas of who might do it. This was dropped off the task list.
  • Task 129: Disaffiliation Procedure. We considered what to do with ‘moribund’ groups, the conclusion being that they should be deleted rather than mothballed. The procedure was amended to reflect this.
  • Task 128: Membership Information. This discussion is ongoing. We are considering the changes in how Freegle has grown, alongside GDPR implications, that could indicate that volunteers shouldn’t still assume ownership and transfer of membership data if they wish to disaffiliate.

Our task list is very near to being completed. Something I never thought I’d say. Hopefully that means we are in pretty good shape as an organisation for procedural stuff and the years of wrangling with words has paid off with a system that works. Our task list remains open for new topics and tasks.

Jacky, Development Coordinator

THANKS

The Board would like to thank Andrew Trusty of Trashnothing for providing an alternative interface which is popular with members.

And most importantly, every local volunteer for giving their time, passion and care to their communities to enable freegling throughout the UK.

DECLARATION

The Directors declare that they have approved the report above. Signed on behalf of the Directors of Freegle Ltd:

Edward Hibbert
Board Chair

Date 5th September 2023


Links:

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