Education

Should You Print Values in Live Auction Catalogs?

After you have solicited your auction items and written the copy for the live auction catalog, there is still one final decision to be made: Should you include the fair market value of your auction items in your catalog? Most committees see this as a yes or no option – print the fair market value or print nothing. There is a third option that often helps accomplish the goals of the catalog more directly: opening bid.

In addition to being a marketing piece, the catalog helps set bidders’ expectations. Hopefully, the catalog helps bidders establish a budget for how much they think they’ll need to spend if they want to win a particular lot.

If you print nothing in the catalog, you give your bidders no clues for setting their own expectations. Pricing for items with an easily identifiable retail value can be looked up online. For any “priceless” experiences, however, your bidders will be completely left to their own imaginations.

The traditional option is to print the fair market value of each lot in the catalog, and while this has worked fine for many events, there are still two main issues with this practice. First, it has the potential to set a ceiling by stating what each lot is worth. Second, some lots are, by definition, priceless. Guaranteed reservations at a popular restaurant, for example, have literally no declarable value. But the perceptual value is often ridiculously high.  

“Priceless” can be an acceptable substitute for fair market value on a small percentage of your auction catalog. However, if over half of your catalog is an experience that cannot otherwise be purchased, “priceless” and all of its synonyms begin to lose their power.

Printing the opening bid for each lot in your catalog manages expectations, honors fair market values, and accounts for “priceless” auction items. Informing bidders of where the bidding for each auction lot is going to begin encourages bidders to do some of their own math without placing a ceiling on value. It also helps to manage expectations when an auction lot has an extremely opening bid by removing the unnecessary element of surprise.

Printing the opening bids also makes sure your committee is doing its due diligence by evaluating each auction lot to find a fair and enticing starting point. The opening has to be appropriate for the lot – and your crowd.

Finally, if you are going to print opening bids in your catalog, you need to commit to them. The power of the printed opening bid evaporates if your auctioneer consistently drops to a lower price point.

Spring 2023 Wrap-up

The year is halfway over and the spring fundraising season is coming to a close. It is a good time to identify the fundraising auctions trends that have emerged, how they have impacted events, and how best to work with them to create successful event. First and foremost, we are seeing continuation of trends that started last year.

One of the most promising trends of 2023 is the younger generation stepping up and supporting charities at a high level

People are still waiting until much later in the planning process to purchase their tickets than they would have done pre-pandemic. This spring we saw a number of events come up against their deadline to confirm the catering order while attendees were still continuing to purchase tickets.

Check with your event venue and/or caterer to see how they’ve been addressing this issue. Unless your event is known for selling out quickly, be prepared to work to motivate ticket buyers as you come down the home stretch. And most importantly, know that this behavior is the norm these days.

Another part of the new normal is the volume of crowds remains louder than ever. Setting aside all attempts to analyze why this is true, the simple fact is once people are at an event together, they tend to be extremely loud. Crowds that are usually staid or reserved are loud, and crowds that are known for being loud are cacophonous.

Work with your A/V partner to ensure the sound system you have in place is designed to address this. Specifically, you need more coverage with more power – not just more power (think “auction surround sound”). Craft your timeline to ensure you are giving your crowd the time they need to blow off steam. Fine-tune your program so that everything that happens onstage is meaningful and engaging.

Auctions are getting shorter. When I first started doing fundraising auctions in 2004, the average auction length was 25 - 30 lots. That number has shrunk to about 12 lots, with many events strategically opting to do a fund-a-need only. Shorter auctions means fewer lots to generate the money, obviously, but it does not mean you have to restrict your auction to fewer bidders.

Buy-in-lots have surged post-pandemic and continue to be extremely popular, as I documented in an earlier blog post. As events opt to hold shorter and shorter auctions, buy-ins have become an integral way to engage more bidders *and* raise more money.

Another trend this year is the rise of the “sponsor a spot” auction lot. Similar to a buy-in, but instead of securing an opportunity for oneself, we ask bidders to sponsor beneficiaries of the event to participate in an experience (read a more detailed blog post here).

Crowds are also getting younger, and I’m not just saying that because I’m feeling older these days. We are definitely seeing a new demographic emerge at fundraising events, and the late 30’s to early 40’s set is starting to have an impact.This means you have to keep your program fresh and utilize forms of marketing that meet this market where it lives and plays. It also means that you need to develop a couple of fun and creative auction lots that appeal to this demographic – buy-ins usually fit the bill.

We are seeing events trend upwards again. Most events – not all, but most – are making more money than last year. Many are setting new records, after setting new records last year. This is partially the work of expectation management, of crowds expecting to raise more money each year. But it is also the work of development teams, boards, and committees who do a great job of setting individual attendees’ expectations for their participation in the event.

One disturbing trend we’ve seen emerge this year is fake bids: people making a bid and then either denying they made the bid or outright refusing to pay. This has happened at numerous events this spring, including at some of our biggest events. At one event, a bidder obviously and repeatedly bid on a lot until the lot sold to them for $36,000 – at which point they simply refused to acknowledge their winning bid and insisted they had not been bidding. Utilizing a payment processing system that enables you to tie bidder numbers directly to credit cards will help prevent this, but it will not make it completely go away.

Another great solution for this is to utilize professional bid spotters. You may already pay a premium for your fundraising auctioneer, but the additional cost of professional bid spotters will more than pay for itself, especially if you have a crowd of more than 350 people. Professional spotters help make the auction livelier and more engaging for the whole crowd, but especially those last few rows of tables.

Without professional spotters, we often do not know a bid was false until the lot has already been sold to that false bid. Then we have to re-open the lot, find the last bidder, re-engage them, and so on. Professional bid spotters can help verify bidder behavior and alert the auctioneer to false bids before they become problematic. They can directly engage with bidders and confirm a bidder’s intent (or lack thereof) while the auctioneer is still actively selling an auction lot. As few as one or two professionals “on the ground” in an auction can make everything go more smoothly.

To summarize: what we are seeing so far in 2023 are crowds that wait longer to buy their tickets, are louder than ever when they get to the event, and spend more in support of their chosen charities than ever before. These crowds are getting younger and require both programming and auction lots that map to their demographic. If your event has more than 350 attendees, consider using professional bid spotters to help make your event more successful.

Join us for our upcoming workshop: Getting Back to Live and In-Person

Live events are coming back! Are you ready? Many of us have not held a live event in a while, so let’s get together to talk about what has changed and what still works in the world of fundraising auctions and non-profit event production.

Presented by industry experts from Greater Giving, Beth Sandefur Events, The Lux Productions, and Stellar Fundraising Auctions. This workshop will feature in-depth discussions on how the culture of in-person events has evolved, the ways auction software has changed, best practices for registration in the time of covid, leaving your silent auction online, making your fund-a-need successful, live auction lots that work, conducting a hybrid event, breakout Q&A sessions, and more.

Registration includes lunch and a cooking demonstration by Orion Sylvester of Orion’s Kitchen. Seminar is limited to 50 attendees, so register now!

How to Knock Your Next Fundraising Auction Out of the Park

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

Registration open for San Francisco workshop, October 26

Registration is now open for our upcoming San Francisco fundraising auction workshop: Raise More, Right Now: Advanced Fundraising Auction Strategies
This in-depth fundraising auction workshop will be held on Wednesday, October 26th at the Log Cabin in the Presidio in San Francisco, California. It is presented by Stellar Fundraising Auctions, Beth Sandefur Events, Greater Giving and The Lux Productions. 

This in-depth, highly interactive workshop will provide you with advanced strategies to raise more with what you already have. Learn how to get attendees to commit to supporting you before they arrive, new techniques for marketing your auction, new revenue enhancers that encourage spending, and more. Session topics will include:

  • Storytelling for your mission
  • Creating successful auction lots
  • Revenue enhancers, beyond the raffle
  • Strategies to refresh your silent auction
  • New technologies to stretch your audio visual budget
  • Marketing your auction

Hands-on mobile bidding session
Many organizations are looking for information about the most buzzed about trend in events: going mobile. This workshop session will include an overview of Greater Giving’s Mobile Bidding and Storefront functions. We’ll discuss how mobile bidding impacts your event and how you can incorporate raffle and other multi-item sales into your event using storefront.

Expert roundtables
The workshop ends with a 1-hour series of small group sessions with each member of our expert panel. We will break into groups by organization type, and spend an hour drilling down on the topics that matter to you most. Ask questions and get answers that are relevant to the needs of your specific event with experts in the field of fundraising auction planning, implementation and performance.

Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - the Log Cabin in the Presidio, San Francisco
9:00am – 3:00pm
Check-in begins at 8:30am
Continental breakfast and lunch will be provided.

Click here to register.