AGM Board Annual Report 2024

DIRECTORS’ REPORT

We’re still here! We say this every year - but it’s still true. Tech giants have risen and fallen, and we are still around. But we shouldn’t make any bones about it - last year was tough.

• Our traffic numbers are a little down on the previous year. They shouldn’t be - we know there is a lot of wasted stuff still getting burnt or buried.
• We recruited an admin person (Lou). That worked well, but Lou has now left us and we need to find a replacement.
• We trialed an external web development firm. After some initial promise, we decided that didn’t work for us. We will need to come back to that.
• Boosting advertising revenue. We’ve done some work on that which looks like it will raise a useful but not game-changing amount.

What holds us back is capacity - both volunteers and funds. To make more of an impact, we need more of both.
And there are changes coming over the next year.

Edward will be stepping down as Board Chair, and in a year’s time leaving the Board. It isn’t healthy for an organisation or an individual for the same person to be in place for so long. New ideas and new energy are needed. If that’s you, pitch in.

We’re doing some strategy work to clarify what kind of structure and resources we need to thrive as an organisation. We don’t just need wishes and aims - we need plans and the people to put them into action.

This is a crunch time, probably more so than any year since we started. If Freegle is to have a sustainable future and help make the future sustainable, we need to be building that now.

FINANCE REPORT

Can be found here: AGM Finance Report and Audit disapplication 2024

AUDIT

Request from the Board of Freegle:
The Board would like the AGM to approve the dis-application for a full audit for the Freegle Ltd accounts 2024/25. This would be in line with previous procedure and is due to the level of expense for an external auditor and time required from the volunteer Treasurer for a full audit.

Co-operative and Community Benefit Societies Act 2014 states, a full audit must be done if they are a charitable IPS with a turnover of over £250,000. As we don't get near to these figures the expense and time for a full audit seems unnecessary when our transparency is confirmed by a qualified accountant’s Independent Examination.

If the above is agreed, the Board would also like the meeting to approve the continued appointment of Price and Co as independent examiners for the accounts, fees to be agreed by the Board on behalf of Members.

More information can be found in the legal explanatory note here: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2014/14/section/84

GOVERNANCE

Legal Structure

Freegle is a registered Society, and full details of our registration are at https://mutuals.fca.org.uk/Search/Society/9593. 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: 164 Members ceased during the year: 0 Members admitted during the year: 4 Members at the end of the year: 168

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 via [[1]]
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 - resigned September 2023
• Edward Hibbert
• Craig Hilton
• Mike Jury - resigned March 2024
• Mike Paterson
• Penny Townsend
• Jen Williams
• Ruth Willmore - resigned September 2023
• Rev Bill Hopkinson

Freegle had the following Director roles during this past year:

• Chair - Edward Hibbert
• Company Secretary - Mike Jury, followed by Kathryn Bird
• 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 in the following appointed roles:

• Treasurer - Jane Loveday
• Assistant Treasurer - Jacky Barrett
• Returning Officers - Alison Redway, Jacky Barrett
• Ombudsman - Jeni Mason, Kim Hiscock
• Governance - Kathryn Bird

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 6 active members; Jo, Roger, Melissa, Stuart, Ray and Derek, but we will always welcome anyone that wants to join us, please contact us at newgroups@ilovefreegle.org.

From 1st September 2023 to 31st August 2024 we closed 6 cases.

• 3 - New groups were launched
• 2 - Groups had a core area review combined with merging of groups and a name change
• 1 - group had a core area extension and a name change
• There is currently 1 open case.

With fewer requests for new groups to be formed it has been a quieter year than normal and some long standing group members have now moved on to other things, we thank them for their dedicated service over the years.

Derek
Freegle New Groups Team

Ombudsman

We confirmed 5 members of the Advisory Panel to assist us this year but did not need to consult them regarding the two complaints forwarded to us.

The first was from a member who had been banned due to his language. After his agreement to moderate this in future, the group agreed to reinstate him after an appropriate cooling-off period.

The second was from a member who complained about overzealous moderation restricting her ability to post. This was found to be incorrect as her posts were allowed after some clarification. She refused to accept the posting requirements and, after abusive emails were sent to a moderator, she will remain banned.

Jeni & Kim

Trustpilot Reviews Report

We have received 5 reviews in the past year. Four of these were 5*, commenting on the ease of use of the site, excellent service, a real online community with friendly and helpful volunteers.

The other was 1*. This from someone who had been banned on two groups for their abusive emails to group volunteers. Their complaints had been reviewed by Ombudsman and judged unfounded.

Jen

Social Media Report

The board’s decision to cut ties with the Twitter pages has reduced the amount of work needed done by the social media team, but we have been active with the Facebook (FB) side of things.

A number of groups have contacted us at socialmedia@ilovefreegle.org to assist them with the relink of their groups Facebook (FB) pages and we have been successful in relinking 17 of them, but there are still a number of groups that there has been no reply from the page admins, so the relink process could not be done.

There are 51 groups currently not linked between the FB and Freegle pages so they are not sharing any publicity. If any groups would like assistance with this then, please get in touch with the team.

There are also 20 Freegle groups that have no FB page at all and 3 groups that have been linked to the wrong FB page. If any of these groups would like a page created and linked then please get in touch at the team address.

There are other FB pages that do not have full Freegle contact details or share links to their Freegle pages, and sadly there are still a few FB pages that have old Yahoo links and email addresses showing, if group Mods have access to their FB page it might be worth checking these details.

A special thanks to Jean without whose help a lot of older FB pages we would not have been able to relink.

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 admin details please get in touch at socialmedia@ilovefreegle.org

Derek
For the Freegle Social Media Team

Training Group Report

In the last 12 months, the training group has had 24 potential volunteer moderators start the training process of which 12 have successfully completed the training and gone on to become Moderators on groups all across the country. We also had one existing Moderator wishing to learn about one aspect of Modtools they were unsure about.

There have been prospective trainees 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, there were also a number of people included in the totals that actually failed to answer the phone after setting a day and time for the first training session.

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 message board and one that sadly might need to be rejected.

The trainees are shown how to edit a post that is 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 relayed to the member on what they have done to the post and why.

The trainees have a lot to learn in a short time frame, but we do feel they get a good basic knowledge during their time with us, and then go to their respective groups and 'learn by doing'.

Derek
For the Freegle Training Team

Volunteer Support Team Report

The team of David and Kim help keep our discussion forums running. For Example: We check that members on our Forums are indeed Freegle Volunteers

We also offer help to any volunteers with using Discourse Our main wiki has lots of useful info re how to use Discourse: https://wiki.ilovefreegle.org/Discourse

David and Kim
volunteersupport@ilovefreegle.org

Councils & Partnerships Report

There has continued to be an increase in workload of the team, driven both by interest and attention generated by our programme as well as through ongoing project work.

The London Borough of Wandsworth Cost of Living Fund project came to a close in January. The project focused on social housing tenants as well as the broader community. It successfully helped to increase the number of freeglers in the borough by over 2000. We will be presenting this project and a more general overview of Freegle at the Resources and Waste Management conference in September.

Following on from the initial project, we successfully bid for another £15k of funding to run a year-long project aimed at hard-to-reach communities in Wandsworth. This is now underway.

The second National Reuse Day (NRD) has been planned for 18th October. The team are creating media and web assets and spreading the word already to ensure that this year builds on last year's success.

We have continued to see a lot of engagement with councils across the country, taking the total number of councils that we have met with or spoken to to over 90, including several regional waste authorities. Partnership (sponsorship) renewals have been successful with Lancashire, Lancaster, Essex, Buckinghamshire and Cheltenham totalling . Newcastle-under-Lyme renews shortly.

We will be presenting at the RWM conference this year and have managed to secure a longer panel session.

Freegle Bites continues to be sent to our council contacts on a monthly basis and is directing enquiries on particular subjects to the team on a regular basis.

One of the most exciting projects this year has been our Freegle videos. Natalie and Anna spent a day filming with a professional filmmaker in Brighton including at the Free Shop. We are waiting for the final videos to be sent to us which will be used to promote Freegle and support our projects for years to come. We hope they will get us lots of attention on social media reaching diverse audiences.

Natalie & Anna

National Mailbox/Info Report

Activity in the info@ mailbox has been c.1200 chats since the 2023 AGM, a 25% decrease over the same period last year. This is due to improving the thank you process for donations, as we were playing 'catch up' over the previous 2 years.

We field questions about a range of non-technical things from members, volunteers and outside agencies and are the first line of contact for complaints and recently volunteering opportunities. The most difficult emails we receive are complaints from members about volunteers, which are challenging to handle and we always regret if we have to pass them to the Ombudsman.

Amongst the more interesting enquiries, we were asked recently to approve an acknowledgement in a book about to be published, and a handful of members have suggested publicity opportunities in their various areas for Freegle. It’s great to have such a variety of enquiries.

Jacky and Angelika
Freegle mailbox

National Mailbox/Support Report

In Support, Dee, Angelika and Jacky, and sometimes other people, help users and moderators with problems concerning Freegle policy, user behaviour, anything really. On Mod Tools and Freegle Direct tech issues, we support Geeks (Edward and Chris), so they can support us.

Some ”clients“ are very knowledgeable, outstripping us, others are brief in the extreme. Quite a lot of messages contain no text at all. So when necessary we ask for more information to get what we or the Geeks need.

Of approximately 1725 threads this year there were 40 blank emails, with no subject heading either.

This year there is a new facility for Mods to ask for help direct from a chat with a click of the button labelled “Refer to Support”. This started on 5th November 2023 and has been used by 20 different moderators 35 times between them. So the new contact method has proved useful to some.

It is always a pleasure to be able to help other Mods and we encourage those who don’t make use of the service to give us a try.

Mentors Report

The team at present consists of 8 members.

Vee recently stood down from the team and her role as Team Coordinator and we would like to thank her for her years of service in this position.

I took over as Team Coordinator in June, but have not been able to completely fulfil the role due to my wife’s continuing ill health. I am very grateful to the other members of the team who have rallied round and helped me during this difficult time.

We continue to try to reduce the number of caretaker groups we are responsible for and the following shows our present position regarding groups that we have some/all responsibility for.

• Current caretaker groups - 30
• Mentoring 10 other groups (plus a new group was opened - Wednesbury)

Actively helping on groups -

• Total of new cases added this year was 17, this includes new caretaker or mentor

groups and helping out

• Handed over from caretakers to group mods – 14

However, caretakers often stay on as informal backups after groups are handed over, but we do not currently keep a record of these.

In total we finished helping out, caretaking or mentoring 24 groups.

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

Ray Owen (aka Mr O)
Mentor Team Coordinator
Email: Freegle-mentors@groups.io

Returning Officers

We have a strange role, because we're usually redundant for most of the year, then have two months or so of busy activity to make sure the AGM and elections take place as they should.

This year, however, we've spent some time reviewing the AGM and election processes, and worked with the Board and Chris to learn from the last nine years and to make this tenth AGM and Election more streamlined whilst still retaining wide participation. We'll see if that works out!

Alison and Jacky
Returning Officers

WORKING GROUPS

Working groups are where we discuss how Freegle should run. We currently have a 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.

THANKS

The board would like to thank 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 22nd August 2024

Links:

• Googledoc copy of this report https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gv4lNuGZkIiKLnCk5WSldwRaMrETd0lM4J0KFDXwgN4/edit?usp=sharing
• AGM 2023 Annual Report https://docs.google.com/document/d/18GHeoBZx10JGvxWEMJ0l5tnH67rx8_GhPGJuxVVrJe4/edit
• AGM 2024 Agenda