Donated goods intake planner

What goes in and out

You give it

• The goods you accept now and the goods you turn away
• Your monthly item volume by category (optional)
• Your intake space, drop-off hours and staff or volunteer count
• Your current grading rules, if you have any (optional)
• Your current discard rate, plus disposal or recycler costs (optional)
• The main intake problem you want fixed
• Document (optional)

You get

• Acceptance list, intake layout, grading guide, routing plan, basic receipt template, and tracking measures.

How the task works

• Define what you accept. Write what goods you accept. Plan staffed drop-offs or booked pickups.
• Sort, test, and grade. Sort goods into groups and grade each item Premium or Boutique (like new, name brand), Standard (normal wear), Value or As-Is (worn but working) or Reject. Test electrical items and send high-value goods for review.
• Route and record goods. Route each graded item to one of four lanes, shop floor, online sale, salvage or recycling, or discard as a last resort. Plan basic receipts without assigning a donor tax value.

Full instructions

• Open a chat in Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini. No code, files or paid tools are needed.
• Paste the skill text from this page into the chat.
• Add your answers to the list under what you give. Say the biggest problem first.
• Read the plan. Check that the accepted list and grading tiers match your real shop.
• Have a person check the receipt wording before you use it. Receipts are tax papers for the donor.
• Share the monthly intake dashboard with your team, and review it each month.

Full instruction file

Nonprofit Donation Intake & Grading

Before you start

Use the material below to do this job. If facts or tool access are missing, explain what you can finish and what must wait.

What you need (use your own material or the linked skill):

• Your question (yours): the decision or problem, and what a good outcome looks like.

Makes it better (optional):

• A document (yours): a finished document, such as a Word file, a PDF or a page of notes.

How to start:

1. Look first. Use what they've already attached, pasted or put in their about-me note. In a coding assistant with file access, look in the project too for these by name.
2. Check what's missing. Look for your question, a document. They can attach files, paste the details, or share a file path your assistant can read. Ask only for missing facts that change the result. If they ask you to start with what they have, complete the parts you can and mark the gaps.
3. Do the job. Follow the skill below with the facts and tools you have. Mark each gap with MISSING: where it belongs and never invent a fact to fill it.

Tools that do this best:

• A chat AI that can read your files: The skill works from records and drafts you provide. Research tasks also need current, checked public sources.

When to Use This Skill

Use this skill to design or fix the physical intake pipeline for a resale operation (Goodwill-style retailer, Habitat ReStore, hospital/church thrift shop): donor drop-off and pickup logistics, sorting and grading donated goods, deciding what goes to the sales floor versus salvage/recycling versus the landfill, and issuing the at-donation receipt donors need for their own records. Typical triggers: "we have a backlog of unsorted donations," "design our drop-off shed workflow," "our discard rate is too high," "train new intake volunteers on grading," "set up an at-donation receipt process."

Boundary: this skill handles the physical intake/sort/grade/triage workflow and the basic at-donation receipt (a dated acknowledgment of items received, no value stated). It does not handle donor-side tax valuation or receipting beyond that basic receipt — IRS Form 8283, the $500/$5,000 appraisal thresholds, qualified appraisals, and gift acceptance policy for high-value or unusual in-kind gifts live in your tax adviser (a gift acceptance skill is not in this library yet). Once an item is graded and released to the floor, its price and merchandising treatment is a retail pricing guide (not in this library yet); if it's routed to online sale instead of the floor, handoff to the Donated goods online resale planner.

Core Framework: The Intake Funnel

Model intake as a funnel with a named decision at each stage, not an undifferentiated "donations pile":

1. Acceptance — accept or decline at the point of donation (curbside, drop-off door, home pickup) against a written accepted/not-accepted items list.
2. Sort — split by category (clothing, housewares, furniture, electronics, books/media, hazardous/recall) and by initial condition.
3. Grade — apply a consistent quality standard within each category.
4. Triage — route each graded item to one of four lanes: Sell-floor, Sell-online (high value, handoff to the Donated goods online resale planner), Salvage/recycle/textile-recycler or auction-bin liquidator, or Discard (landfill, last resort).
5. Receipt — issue the donor's at-donation receipt before or at drop-off, regardless of which lane the item is later routed to.

Track a sell-through rate by intake lane and a discard rate as % of donation volume by weight or unit — these two numbers are the standard health metrics for an intake operation; a rising discard rate is the earliest signal of an acceptance-policy or donor-communication problem, not a grading problem.

Standard Terminology

• Accepted items list: the written, publicly posted list of what the org takes (e.g., clothing, small furniture, working small appliances) and explicitly does not take (mattresses without law tags, cribs pre-2011 standard, CRT TVs, upholstered furniture with rips/stains, recalled items).
• Grading tiers: typically Premium/Boutique (like-new, name-brand, sets), Standard (sellable, normal wear), Value/As-Is (functional but heavily worn, sold at a flat low price or by-the-pound), and Reject (not sellable — routed to salvage or discard).
• Salvage stream / diversion rate: goods routed to textile recyclers, scrap-metal buyers, or bulk/auction liquidators instead of the sales floor or the landfill; tracking this as a % of total intake demonstrates environmental-mission impact to funders and is often reportable separately from retail revenue.
• Bailment period: the short window (commonly 24-72 hours) between drop-off and formal acceptance during which title has not yet transferred, used in some donation agreements to allow a final accept/decline decision after inspection — check state law and the org's own gift acceptance policy before relying on a bailment clause. Skip this if you have no donation agreement.

Step-by-Step: Building or Fixing an Intake Operation

1. Publish a written accepted/not-accepted items list and post it at every drop-off point, on the website, and with any pickup-scheduling tool — vague guidance ("bring your gently used items") is the single biggest driver of high discard rates and volunteer burnout from unusable donations.
2. Design the drop-off/pickup logistics. For staffed drop-off: define hours, a covered unloading area, and a "no unattended drop after hours" policy if illegal dumping at the donation shed is a problem. For scheduled home pickup: set a routing/scheduling cadence (e.g., weekly by zone), a minimum-item threshold to justify a truck stop, and a pre-pickup phone/text screen against the accepted-items list to avoid wasted trips.
3. Set up the sort station physically separate from the sales floor, with labeled bins per category and a clear "reject" bin visible to sorters so declines are consistent, not ad hoc.
4. Write and train to a grading rubric with photos of each tier per category (this is worth building as a real one-page laminated reference per category — clothing, housewares, electronics — since grading disagreement between volunteers/staff is the most common intake quality complaint).
5. Test electronics and anything with a plug or battery before grading it sellable; never place untested electrical items on the floor — this is both a safety and a return-rate issue.
6. Route high-value or collectible-looking items to a designated reviewer (not the general sort line) for a decision between sell-floor, online listing (the Donated goods online resale planner), or referral to your tax adviser (a gift acceptance skill is not in this library yet) if the item may need formal tax documentation.
7. Issue the at-donation receipt at the point of drop-off: dated, lists the organization's name and EIN, a general description of item categories (not a per-item value — the donor is responsible for valuing their own non-cash gift for tax purposes), and a standard statement that no goods or services were provided in exchange. Do not let receipt issuance become a bottleneck that discourages donors from completing drop-off.
8. Track discard rate and diversion rate monthly and review with the intake team; if discard rate rises, the fix is almost always to the accepted-items list or donor communication, not to re-training graders.
9. Reconcile intake volume against any hauling/disposal cost — discard and salvage streams often carry a real cost (tip fees, recycler pickup fees); an intake operation that doesn't track this cost will understate the true cost of donation processing in the business model.

Standard Deliverables

• Written accepted/not-accepted items list (public-facing)
• Drop-off and pickup logistics plan (hours, routing cadence, minimum thresholds)
• Category grading rubric with tier photos
• Intake triage flowchart (sell-floor / sell-online / salvage / discard)
• At-donation receipt template
• Monthly intake dashboard: volume, discard rate, diversion rate, sell-through by lane

Common Failure Modes

• Vague accepted-items list leading to high discard rates and volunteer time spent triaging junk.
• No separation between sort station and sales floor, so ungraded, untested, or unsafe items reach customers.
• Untested electronics placed on the floor, creating safety complaints and refund/return churn.
• High-value items sorted into the general line instead of routed to a designated reviewer, losing revenue that online resale or a proper in-kind gift process would have captured.
• Receipt issuance skipped or delayed, generating donor complaints at tax time and eroding repeat donation behavior.
• Discard cost untracked, making the true cost of running the donation program invisible to leadership and the board.

Practitioner vs. Advisor Framing

• As store/intake staff or a program manager, build the grading rubric with photos, not just prose — text-only standards produce inconsistent grading between volunteers on different shifts, which is the top driver of both high discard rates and pricing disputes downstream.
• As a consultant advising a thrift operation, diagnose intake problems by looking at the discard-rate trend line first before touching staffing or pricing — a discard-rate spike almost always traces back to an acceptance-policy or donor-communication gap upstream, and fixing pricing or staffing without fixing that gap won't move the number.

After this

When you've handed it back, suggest what they could do next in one short question. It's a suggestion: if they're done, that's fine. Offer these, and say they can type their own:

• The Action item tracker. It takes the plan.
• The Task list manager. It takes the plan.
• The Meeting minutes writer. It takes the plan. If they pick one and that skill is added here, carry straight on with what you just made. If not, give the link and say what to bring.