How to donate business items to charity in the UK: your quick guide
This blog explores the three options that UK businesses tend to donate items to charities. If you’re a business looking for the best ways to donate items to charity, we hope you find this helpful.
Businesses often have surplus items that can end up being sent to landfill if they’re not donated to charity. But following the autumn 2025 Budget, businesses no longer have to pay VAT on donations to charity, making it more favourable and cost-effective than ever to donate. Read the policy paper on GOV.UK
As individuals and at home we often use platforms like Freecycle, Freegle, Facebook Marketplace or take things to our local charity shops. But it can sometimes seem a little more complicated for workplaces and organisations to do the same.
Why should my business donate surplus items to charity?
Your business should donate to support:
the planet - sending less to landfill and tackling environmental pollution
other people - every donation goes to someone who has a need for it
your business - it’s cost effective and can build strong community ties.
You can read the big impact your donations have on our blog.
Businesses in the UK tend to donate items to charities in three main ways:
using apps like A Good Thing to donate directly to local charities for free
forming an established relationship with chosen partners for repeat donations
reaching out ad hoc to large charities, to have the items collected directly.
Option 1: Donating via the A Good Thing app
At A Good Thing, we’re a nonprofit matchmaking platform for businesses and charities. An organisation can sign up once and then list whatever surplus stock they may have to give away, any time.
Just as on a site such as eBay - by listing your items, they become available to any nearby charity that’s interested. The charity requests the items, and then the charity picks them up from your business.
Option 2: Corporate partnerships with charities
This is most applicable to larger businesses. It often involves staff-volunteering initiatives, providing financial support, and even linking products with donations.
Large charities usually have detailed information on establishing partnerships, so if this is something you’d like to consider, you can search for a charity with aligned values and contact them to set up a suitable partnership. This donation option is more of a commitment and might not be suited for ad-hoc donations of surplus items, although your terms of partnership can likely be arranged.
Option 3: Free charity collection service
You can ring up a large charity like the British Heart Foundation, Barnado’s or Oxfam and get them to come to your business premises to take away your furniture for it to be resold in their network of charity shops. Charities can handle redistribution to the shop branches that need them.
This is particularly great for ad-hoc donations and a somewhat more detached approach to giving. An important thing to consider with this option is that smaller, local charities often don’t have these logistics and therefore miss out on your donations. With that in mind, we hope that more businesses can consider supporting small and local charities when looking to donate their items.
What makes A Good Thing different?
Donate almost anything: there are lots of things that can’t be donated to charity shops - but can be donated via our platform. From random electrical appliances to tech (laptops, tablets, phones), and from corporate-branded merchandise to used, worn, or damaged items that repair charities can fix and reuse.
Perfect for any quantity: when you use A Good Thing, you don’t need a lorry-load of items to make it worthwhile. Whether you have one laptop or 150 branded mugs, you can list them on the platform in minutes, and the charity can then make arrangements to come and collect them from you.
Transformative impact: when items go direct into a charity, your donations can make a huge difference to the daily operations of that organisation. Items matched via A Good Thing end up with charities because they match a specific need. The impact of that is often transformative.
So, what’s the best way to make business donations of items to charity? It could be all three! You can explore long-term partnerships, use large charities’ collection services if needed, and also join A Good Thing so that small, local charities aren’t left out.
Using A Good Thing is a quick, easy and sustainable way of redistributing excess stock and of getting items directly to the small, local charities on your business’s doorstep that need them most.