The importance of donating essential items like toiletries to asylum seekers is quite clear. These items help maintain dignity, hygiene, and well-being while they are in asylum in Ireland. While local in-person donations have been a traditional approach among many charities and community led initiatives, another efficient method can be used: buying items online for click-and-collect.

The reason that this method should have consideration is that if utilised correctly, it can be just as efficient and effective for asylum seekers and donors.

A Closer Look At Traditional Donation Drives

Community-led donation drives have been fantastic in recent years but they also come with their fair share of pros and cons.

The Pros:

1. Collective Encouragement

An obvious advantage of local donation drives is the tightknit communities collectively encourage each other to support a donation drive. Members of a community often inform, encourage, and showcase their efforts to a local donation drive.

Think about how many times you donated to a local cause or initiative because your family member, partner or friend was donating to it.

2. Trust

Another reason why local donation drives are effective is because of the trust that a community has for them. Donating to an organisation that you or your community are unfamiliar with elicits a series of questions like:

"Why are you supporting this cause?"

"Will my money or contribution really help?"

"Will I see proof that I have made a difference?"

These questions are completely reasonable to ask but the effort of finding and verifying the answers to this information can be time-consuming. However, by donating to a donation drive that your community has experience with, these questions become a lot easier to answer. 

The positive experiences your friends and family have had with previous donation drives are showcased to you so that you can establish trust with them.

Establishing trust is a really big factor in getting someone to donate to a cause for the first time and a community's previous experiences are key way to establishing that trust.

The Cons:

Now to start with the weaknesses of traditional donation drives. These weaknesses mainly fall under the umbrella of them being time-consuming. When organising donation drives you have to manage a wide variety of things.

1. Organising a Drop Off Location

The first one is to decide a drop-off location. It's here can the donations be stored until they're ready to be delivered to those who need them. Often this is difficult to manage because people donate at different times of the day depending on their schedule. So the drop-off location needs to be available for large portions of the day to receive impromptu donations.

2. Arranging Transport

The second that arises is transport. When will the donated items get to where they need to be? Who will deliver them? Will it be free of charge or will someone need to be paid to deliver them? Will someone be there to collect the donations?

These questions sound difficult to answer because they are. The delivery person, the person receiving the donations and the drop-off location need to work together to sort out this. That is a very time consuming process

3. Time Management

Lastly, the last weakness is the first weakness I mentioned. It's time-consuming. Donating is a voluntary experience. We take out part of our day in the hopes of making a positive impact to a cause.

But our daily lives are unpredictable and our own responsibilities can take hold of us at any point. So for some, it's quite difficult to help out causes that matter to them on a consistent basis. With this in mind, people find it very difficult to donate on a consistent basis.

An Alternative Approach

Direct Donate is a website that aims to utilise the strengths of traditional donation drives while also supplementing its weaknesses. Essentially it shows you how to buy toiletry items in a local pharmacy for click and collect in the name of asylum seekers.

You buy the item and they pick it up from the pharmacy when it suits them.

When you use Direct Donate to make a donation and when that donation is received by the asylum seeker, we will inform our donors through our email and social media accounts. This showcases the strengths of community encouragement and trust.

Donors only have to spend a few minutes to buy what they would like to donate to asylum seekers.  The collection point is handled by the pharmacy and they will hold the items for a set period of time.

The asylum seekers can now choose to go to the pharmacy to collect the items when it suits them. In bare-bone terms;

Direct. Donate. Saves. Everyone. Time.

The point of this article is not to say traditional donation drives are not helpful or impactful. They are and they always will be. Direct Donate is just an alternative approach to helping asylum seekers navigate their asylum in Ireland while also helping communities feel like they are making a difference.

The more methods we have to help those in need, the better the chance we can make a lasting impact.