Do Your Homework on Consignment Packages

Consignment companies serve a valuable role in helping round out live auctions. If your auction is in need of an exciting travel package, or something specific that you have been unable to get donated, purchasing an auction lot from a consignment company is a viable option. However, if you are going to purchase a consignment package, it is important to follow a few simple guidelines.

Only purchase from reputable consignment companies that specialize in working with non-profit auctions. Any consignment company worth dealing with will be able to provide you with references to happy clients, auctions that have sold their packages, and bidders who have taken their trips. If you are going to trust the care and handling of your bidders to a company, their partners, or representatives, you need to know they will be treated well.

Sometimes you need a tropical paradise in your live auction, and have to pay to get it.

The financial goal should be at least double your investment. If a consignment package is going to cost $1,500, your target sale price should be at least $3,000. This means you must know your audience, their desires, and their potential budget. Don’t base the decision to purchase a consignment package on what the consignment company says it is worth or on how well it has performed at other auctions.

Shop around and do your homework. Once you find a package that seems like a fit, ask the consigner if they are the provider or if they are a reseller. If they are a reseller, see if you can go directly to the company that provides the package. There are many resellers out there that simply take other consignment company’s packages, mark them up significantly, and then do their best to market them.

A client recently came to me with a consignment package that seemed familiar at first glance, except it was way more expensive than I remembered. Once I looked a little deeper, I realized it was a consignment package from a different company being offered at two times normal cost. What should have cost my client $1,800 was being “offered” at $3,600. As soon as we figured this out, my client simply switched over to the originating consignment company and purchased the package from them.

Consignment packages can be a useful tool for your live auction, raffle, last hero standing, or silent auction, but only if you do your homework, and make sure the package is going to fit your needs, and not vice versa.

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.

Make a Lot with Sponsor a Spot

One of the most successful fundraising auction trends to emerge post-pandemic is the opportunity to sponsor an experience for someone else. Essentially, it is a lot where multiple donors can enable people served by the charity to do something cool or meaningful. We have typically seen this work well for service organizations that work directly with youth, but it is relevant to other organizations as well.

The lot usually consists of an experience such as attending a professional baseball game. Bidders pay a premium to sponsor individuals served by the charity to attend the event. The first time I encountered a lot like this was pre-pandemic, for a Boys and Girls Club. We had sixteen tickets to an A’s game, and we paired it with transportation and food for each youth, and offered bidders the opportunity to sponsor a youth to attend their first professional ballgame for $1,000 each. It sold out quickly.

Access to professional sports teams is an easy place to start, but there are many other opportunities out there.

Since then, we’ve seen similar opportunities with sailing excursions on the Bay, the SF Giants, the 49’ers, and more. At the Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Bay Area event this spring, we sponsored 45 Big/Little matches (90 people total) to attend either a SF Giants or SF 49’ers game at $1,000 per match.

Best of all, this did not negatively impact the fund-a-need. We still had the same number of pledges at the $1,000 level that we had in years past. It underscores that there are different types of donors: those who want to sponsor a very specific outing and those who want to simply give to the organization.  

These examples have been very focused on sports, but there are plenty of other possibilities: a trip to the Theater to see a Broadway show, a behind the scenes visit to the zoo or a museum, private screening of a film, and more.

The intent is to offer people access to something that would be meaningful to them – both donor and recipient. If you can partner with an organization and create an event that maps well to your people and your mission, you will be tapping into new potential at your next event.

Use Poker Chips to Make More Money (and Fun) at Your Fundraising Event

One goal at any fundraising auction is to lower barriers to participation and make it as easy and fun as possible for attendees to donate. One simple (and fun) way to do this is to use poker chips as currency at your event.

Poker chips with each bidder’s number on them are included with each paddle at check-in at the John Muir Health gala.

When you give attendees their paddles at check-in, include a few poker chips with their bidder number printed on them. Attendees can then use those poker chips to enter raffles, play games, or purchase items if you have any for sale. From a psychological standpoint, it is easier to simply place a chip in a basket than it is to pay cash (there is a reason casinos prefer to use chips instead of cash). It is also more fun for attendees to have a stack of chips and be on the lookout for ways to utilize them.

You can make the process as simple or as complicated as you like. The John Muir Health Foundation (pictured) provides each attendee with two chips, and only offers raffle opportunities. Attendees can choose to drop these chips in the bins for the various raffles, or not.

Another organization holds a western-themed event and offers event-themed items for sale at $25 or $50 each (think straw cowboy hats, sheriff’s badges and the like). At check-in, each attendee gets a small bag of chips of varying denominations that adds up to a total of $200, and can spend those chips on the various items available, use them for raffle entries, etc. If they spend all their chips, they can always get more.

Easy to find, easy to participate, and fun! This team selling opportunities for a raffle just needs one thing from you: put your chip in the box!

Take the process one step further, and enable attendees to use their chips in your fund-a-need. After your auctioneer has conducted all the pre-announced levels of the fund-a-need, give the crowd one last opportunity to make a difference. Volunteers walk around with baskets, similar to a “paddle sweep” or “paddle drop,” and attendees make contributions by throwing their chips into the baskets.

It does require a small amount of planning, but the logistics of using chips are straight-forward. You will need to:

• Acquire poker chips (available for about $0.15/each online)

• Print people’s bidder numbers on the chips

• Create opportunities for attendees to use the chips

• Have receptacles for them and volunteers/staff to actively encourage participation

• Create an accounting system for entering and billing all of the contributions

Staff and volunteers need to be prepared to help guide people through the process. “You want to enter a chance to win tickets to a Warriors game? Just put your poker chip right here!” As with any sales job at your event, the most engaging people are going to be the most successful.

Go all-in on something new at your next event! Make donating easier and more fun, and you’ll inevitably raise more money.

The Hottest Trend in Fundraising Auctions Right Now: Buy-in Auction Lots

The type of auction lot that has seen the biggest growth and success in the past two years is the Buy-in Party. Also known as a Count Me In, Sign Up Party, or Buy a Spot: a buy-in auction lot offers bidders the opportunity to purchase tickets to attend an event on a per-unit basis. It could be per person, per pair, per table or even per team.

Buy-ins got their start at school events, where the community is tightly-knit and eager to get together and hang out with each other throughout the year. For many years, the perception was that buy-ins would only work if the majority of the crowd knew each other. Furthermore, many events believed that buy-ins could not generate significant income.

Bidders buying-in at the Boys and Girls Club of Sonoma Valley, 2023.
(Photo credit Melania Mahoney Photography)

But as larger auctions began to realize the versatility of the buy-in lot, they have evolved to become a staple of most every fundraising auction with which we work. Buy-ins give you the capacity to offer a lower level participation in your live auction while still raising the same as (or more than) you would with a single buyer lot.

In the process, buy-ins also offer bidders a “perceived bargain.” Consider a recent auction in Naples, Florida. The lowest any single lot sold for was $12,000 and the most was $52,000. We had a single buy-in for 20 couples that sold for $5,000 per couple. Bidders who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to participate in the live auction got to do so, and that one lot generated more than any other single lot in the auction.

This concept holds true for every auction. If your lowest selling lot goes for $1,000 that means there are people at your event who would love to pay $150 to be able to participate. Put together a party for 20 people at $150 each, and you have a successful lot and have engaged more bidders.

And where buy-ins were popular before the pandemic, they have seen a surge in popularity since. Auction attendees are thrilled to be back in-person, eager to do things together, and ready to get more social activities on their calendars.

If you don’t utilize Buy-In Parties as part of your live auction strategy, you are missing out on a valuable way to raise more money while enabling more people to participate in your auction. For more information on buy-ins, see our “how to” blog post, check out our list of great buy-in auction lot ideas, or contact us directly.