I was recently contacted by Anthony Wilson, founder of Groupfinity, about participating in his podcast series. Groupfinity is a new resource for volunteers and volunteer organizations, committed to providing support and tools for success.
Anthony contacted me because he had served on a number of fundraising auction committees, but had never worked with a professional fundraising auctioneer and consultant before. He had a lot of questions about best practices, and once we got rolling our conversation was, as you can imagine, extensive. I ended up providing him with enough material for two podcasts. We covered myriad topics, from how many volunteers it takes to make an auction successful, to the goals of fundraising auctions, to how to leverage your board to make your next fundraising auction successful.
In short, it was a distillation of my entire philosophy down to an hour of podcast. You can find the entire podcast here, and the timestamps below outline the entire podcast.
[2:48] How many people do you have who are committed to volunteer to make the auction successful
[3:08] For an auction to be successful you have to have a couple of key components taken care of
[3:52] Get people you know have capacity and are prepared to support your event/organization
[4:12] Every event is made by 15 bidders
[4:42] You need people who have connections to invite your supporters
[5:02] The goals of a fundraising auction is three fold 1 Raise money 2 Tell your story 3 Engage new supporters
[6:47] For an event chair, you’ll spend 700 hours over 9 months
[7:39] If you’re looking for someone to chair your fundraising auction, find the busiest person you know
[9:58] In putting together a fundraising auction, it has to be FUN and it has to be FUNdraising
[10:28] Don’t throw a big party and then hit them over the head with an auction when they get there
[15:14] Fund a Need
[16:02] Keys to making your Fund a Need successful
[19:15] 7 Keys to a Fund a Need
[20:35] Fundraising is conversation with your community
[21:00] Talk to your donors to see what they’re interested in supporting
[22:20] We need somebody to get the ball rolling
[23:33] An auction breaks into 3 groups of people
[25:38] Your board needs to do 3 things to make the auction successful
[27:58] What item can I count on you to help bid up?
[28:39] Peer pressure drives donations
[28:56] Fundraising auctions are a place for people to make donations in a public setting
