Identify what types of items your attendees will find attractive, and ensure you have a range of items available for every budget. With all the business taken care of, it’s time to thank everyone for coming and send them home with a cheery goodbye. Express your gratitude for coming to your charity fundraiser and wish them well. There’s no best approach when it comes to how you manage your silent auction. Take a look at both options and see what works best for your organization, event, and guests. The best items will always be ones that appeal to most of your audience.
Not to mention, since guests pre-register their credit cards, mobile bidding completely eliminates the need for an involved checkout process. This may be starting to sound intimidating, but you can make sure your overhead is covered by selling admission tickets to your event at the right price. To calculate a minimum ticket price, divide your total estimated overhead costs by the number of people you think you can reasonably expect to attend. This keeps you covered in case you don’t reach your attendance goal or costs are higher than expected. So the $35 ticket for our example event becomes $42, which you could easily round up to $45. Finally, you’re going to want to think long and hard about the bidding increments that you choose to set for each particular item.
Your organization should be able to receive many of these materials as donations, but it’s always advisable to factor in all potential costs. You don’t want to bank on a donation in your budget only to have that donation fall through—all of a sudden, your budget is busted. If donations for silent auction ’ve already set up your event site to use as an auction catalog, running an online auction should be easy as pie. “This software is the complete package for every aspect of putting on a silent auction. It has made us more professional and allowed us to be able to print a custom receipt at the end of the event for each attendee.”— SchoolAuction.net review by Patti M.
This format invites participation as some may be attending the event as a spectator but be happy to contribute by way of buying a few raffle tickets. Others may be more comfortable with a silent auction and less likely to get into the competitive live auction bidding. A silent auction bid sheet is used to record bids for items sold in silent auctions, which are held without auctioneers.
As a rule of thumb, the starting bid should be at 30% to 50% of the item’s FMV. The general recommendation is to increase bids by 10%-15% of the item. Once you have a good idea of the items your donors want, you can put together a list. You should then put together a procurement team to solicit these items.