[1] Examples of in-kind gifts include goods like food, clothing, medicines, furniture, office equipment, and building materials.
Helping with longer term development in impoverished or otherwise distressed areas is a high priority for governments and large NGOs.
[4] For example, many charities that provide life-saving medications to people in impoverished nations could not afford to buy these drugs using their cash donations or grants alone.
[5] As more and more companies continue to acknowledge their corporate social responsibility, they are also recognizing the benefits of participating in gifts in kind programs.
[13][16] Some critics of gifts in kind argue that, like dumping, these have an artificial adverse impact on local industries producing similar goods.
[19] Occupy Sandy volunteers use a sort of gift registry for this purpose; families and businesses impacted by the storm make specific requests, which remote donors can purchase directly via a web site.
:[23] Unlike a disaster relief scenario, the needs of a charity shop are long-term and more flexible; any item that can be sold at a price higher than the cost of warehousing it could be worthwhile.
Large non-profits, such as Goodwill Industries, are also able to make use of items that cannot be sold in their thrift stores, for example by bundling them and selling them as bulk material or scrap.