Resources
About ASSORT
The Aid Standards for Sorting (ASSORT) are a set of interoperability standards for humanitarian aid that are designed to save grassroots organisations time, effort, and money.
When quality control and sorting are not standardised, inefficiencies arise. These inefficiencies require significant expenditure of resources:
- Quality Control - the receiver may have to pay to dispose of items that are culturally inappropriate, out of season, or poor in quality.
- Sorting - 100,000 aid items on a shipment might be sorted one way by the sender and then re-sorted another way by the receiver. Sorting takes time.
That’s where ASSORT comes in. ASSORT leads to faster, cheaper, and more responsive aid. By providing a “common language” for aid donations, organisations receiving aid can know ahead of time what is on an aid shipment. When the shipment arrives, they process it much faster than they otherwise could. Indeed, a pilot shipment showed that using ASSORT standards significantly cut down on the receiving organisation’s sorting and processing time. Saving time and volunteer capacity makes a big difference for grassroots aid organisations.
The ASSORT Guide includes multiple areas of standardisation:
- How to quality check donated items meant for distribution;
- How to sort donations into standard categories;
- How to size clothing donations with a printable ASSORT sizing chart;
- How to box and label the sorted donations and ready them for shipment.
ASSORT was established as part of a joint partnership between Boxtribute, Distribute Aid, HERMINE, and the InterEuropean Human Aid Association.