Category: Uncategorized

At Perfect Silent Auction, we think a lot about how to have the best online silent auction possible. We talk to a lot of people who are responsible for setting up these events, and maximizing what they get out of them for a cause or an organization. So we think about this process a great deal. What comes out of that is some of the best resources for people who are needing to optimize a silent auction process. 

Setting up and implementing an event like this can be a complex task – there are lots of details to think about and significant logistics to deal with.

Some people have a committee to deal with all of these issues, and others have a ‘committee of one.’

Either way, we can help to crowdsource ideas for silent auctions that will return the best value. Take a look, and you’ll see how easy it can be to go above and beyond with a silent auction plan. 

Bidding Reminders

So what’s the proper use of a bidding reminder?

We talk about this a little bit in our associated resources on the site. The idea is that you want to be able to set bid reminders so that people who have bid on objects know when they have been outbid.

This is the way to generate higher prices in an online auction scenario. In a real-life auction, people see that process happening in real time. However, if they’re online, they won’t see it unless they get a timely bid reminder. You only need to look at how this works on generic auction sites to see that bidding reminders are ultimately important!

So build that into your event footprint and think logically about how that’s going to work. Try it out – or brainstorm with a workflow chart or visualization of some kind. Then you will have a better window into what’s happening for your bidders and buyers. 

Price Setting

We also help with hints around price setting.

For instance, you hear us talking about how consignment items should be started 20% above any applicable cost so that there is a built-in profit.

Then as you use things like bid reminders to maximize price, you’re starting from a solid starting point.

We can also help you to think about revenue and expense templates and advertising and domains and everything that goes along with an online auction. Instead of decking out a physical sale space for a live auction event, you are investing in a digital experience for your bidders. Think and plan accordingly! Ask about what we can do to help your auction be the best it can be and if you have to do this again in the future, you’re likely to come back here for more useful ideas. 

Fundraising is essential to the success of non-profit groups and organizations. From national entities raising money and awareness for causes to local sports teams and clubs raising funds for equipment and necessities, fundraising can be tricky. People are inundated with financial obligations, so hosting exciting fundraising events that are easily accessible to a range of potential donors is necessary to ensure fundraising goals are met. The key is to make your event accessible, determine your donor base and incentives for participation, and tap into your community partners for donations and marketing. 

When choosing the fundraising event for your club, organization, or non-profit, here’s what to consider for creating an event that will draw the most participation.

1) Accessibility 

For your event to produce enough funds to reach your goals, it must be accessible to a large potential donor base. Consider events that allow people to participate outside your local community, such as online silent auctions. In an online silent auction, people can join without having to be located in a particular proximity to your organization or club. For example, school fundraisers work best when students can access their loved ones and family outside the community. In this scenario, an online silent auction is accessible to anyone who may want to participate.

2) Donor Incentives

People often give to fundraisers without expecting to receive goods or services in return. However, to generate excitement in your cause and increase the donations you receive, consider an event that will incentivize donors to participate. You may want to have a raffle where people purchase tickets to win prizes. Raffles work well as fundraising events and take little effort or upfront cost to promote. You can have as many items as prizes or offer one excellent service or entity as the focus of your event. For best results, ask local businesses to donate goods or services to be raffled or auctioned off as prizes for your fundraiser. 

3) Keep The Community Involved

The more you can incorporate your community partners, the more successful your fundraiser will be. Not only can community businesses and organizations supply you with items and services for your event, but they also can be your event’s best advertisers. Each time you partner with a local business, restaurant, medical office, or service provider, you can give them materials to promote your fundraiser in their business and to their customers. Cross-promotion is a top component of a successful fundraiser, as it helps you spread the word about your cause with little to no advertising expenses. Make sure you promote the companies participating in your event on all of your marketing materials to ensure your supporters are also benefiting from their participation.

Final Thoughts

Fundraising for your group or organization can be fun and fruitful when considering the factors that create success. Keep your event accessible to a large potential donor base, incentivize your event for donors, and encourage cross-promotion among community partners to generate excitement for your cause and solidify community engagement. 

Today, many parents shudder at the words school fundraiser. Unfortunately, the stress associated with school fundraisers can prompt many parents only partially to participate. A lot has changed through the years that have caused parents and communities to dread school fundraising season, making it increasingly difficult for schools, clubs, and athletic organizations to raise the funds necessary for their programs. 

Fundraising is more important than ever as governments and school boards continue to cut funding to our local schools. Special activities, field trips, celebrations, and other events are unfortunately cut from schools. To ensure that our students and children get the most out of their educational experience, we must understand the motivation behind the lack of participation in fundraising events and how to bring parents and donors back to the drawing board. 

A Tough Economy Means Less To Donate

The volatility of our economy has made it much tougher to ask friends and family for their financial support for school fundraisers. Considering that students’ primary donors for fundraisers are their parents, tighter family budgets mean less spending on items and products that are not essential. 

Hectic Family Schedules

Parents and caregivers are stretched thin with hectic schedules. With so many single parents as heads of households, parents often don’t have time to go door-to-door with their children or make phone calls asking for support. Schools must consider the type of fundraising event that will work best for their school community.

Fundraising Fatigue

Parents often have more than one child in a school system, so they have to double down on the number of fundraising events to which they donate their time and money. While most parents, teachers, and community members understand the need for school fundraisers, they get burned out with fundraising fatigue. To boost fundraising efforts, schools must find new ways to encourage participation and excite their base. 

Value For Donations

With the increased amount of inexpensive shopping options today, it is hard to ask family and friends to purchase more expensive items for fundraisers. Schools must consider options that are of value to their potential donors, whether it is selling products, services, or experiences.

Bringing The Community Together 

If schools approach fundraising events as ways to bring the community together, they will likely see positive results. More than simply selling products, schools can plan events that parents, teachers, and community members can participate in that raise funds and promotes the school, club, or athletic team. 

Silent auctions are popular school fundraisers as they engage the students with community partners like local stores, restaurants, and service providers who give items to be auctioned. Not only will the businesses be promoted within the community for their involvement, but community members will be more likely to participate if they see exciting services and goods for them to bid. 

Planning a school fundraising event that benefits the students, school, and community is one way to keep people engaged in your cause and eager to help next time. 

There are three words that we like to associate with our Perfect silent auction platform.

They are as follows – (and as mentioned in the title) – accessible, virtual and successful.

We even have an interesting graphic on the landing page where we see these three words substituted for one another.

That’s because they’re important to us in the design and engineering of our auction website, and showing people how auctions have changed in the age of new technologies.

Accessible Auctions

Simply speaking, you want people to be able to reach your auction from wherever they are.

In some ways, it’s sort of similar to the GoFundMe phenomenon, or to crowdsourcing a startup – being able to bring people in digitally is a major achievement for some kind of cause or organization. That’s where the silent auction comes in. Many of these event planners are working off of a sort of vague goal and idea and wondering how to achieve the kinds of results they need for an auction.

The features and formats that we put in the auction site lead to accessibility for a wider audience, and that really delivers value to people who need to put these kinds of auctions together!

Virtual

As mentioned, this vaults your auction into a virtual space in a real way that you’re going to experience when thigs get going. 

People aren’t really attuned to the global metaverse yet, but experts suggest we might be going there with web3 and a decentralized Internet and all the rest. For now, though, transformative platforms are the vanguard of a virtual experience, and we’re pleased to be in that category.

You’ll see when you browse the site the kinds of virtual tools that we provide to make your auction more of a virtual experience.

Successful

Of course we want our auctions to be successful. Why not?

But there are a number of components to this.

You can see a lot of this on display as you browse the site – in addition to notes on how to set up the digital auction itself, we have abundant resources on how to get items to auction, and how to attract sponsors and much more. Every step of the way you need these logistics to work well for you to make your auction all that it can be.

Thinking about all of this, you might get inspired to build your own auction on our platform. Use the resources we have available and get connected to a professional partner that can help you to do what you want with a silent auction. By setting up a kind of one-stop shop, we have allowed lots of newbies to get seasoned on how to conduct a silent auction well, and how to support their chosen cause or company. 

If you look back through the past blog posts, at least some of the more recent ones, we talked a lot about the actual features and resources on the site. We’ve gone over some of the basic utility of having this kind of help for an auction process.

Today we can talk a little bit about what you can see when you peruse the sample websites that show how we often work with clients.

Overall Layout

Scroll and click on over to the sample websites, and you’ll see actual functioning examples of how people used our system to set up excellent online auctions. That’s a good visual for when you’re trying to figure out what your own auction site would look like – and what you’ll need, how you will put things together, etc. 

Anyway, as you look at the sample sites, you’ll see some of the composition and design at work in how we position logo work, text and images in a way that’s accessible to the average visitor.

Along with that, we’re trying to integrate all of the cool things that you put together for your auction to make it as attractive as possible. These are easy to point out when you’re surfing looking at the samples, trying to get an idea of how this type of thing would go for you. 

Logos

Here’s one thing that will be front and center on the sample sites: you’ll see how we fit in the branding that accents your auction site.

This has to do with having graphics that are design-ready and being able to integrate them into the webpage as a whole. That’s part of what is important in organizing these events, too. 

Background Information

Most of these examples have a specific field for background information before you get to the items catalog. This sets the stage and tells the visitor what’s going on – more about the auction and why it’s being done, etc.

Items

This is maybe one of the more complex parts of the sample websites that you can look at for review. It shows more of how the actual items are set up with pricing, banners for names and more. Dressing up these thumbnails provides the user with a better experience!

FAQ

For more, look at our instructive FAQ. This service is not just made to be effective, or to dress up items. It’s made to be user-friendly, and to get people closer to their goals. That’s what we’re all about!

What if there was a new way to run an auction?

What’s wrong with the old way?

Well, for starters, some people find the auctioneer’s voice annoying. Beyond that, though, the traditional auction does not take advantage of the massive power of the Internet for crowdsourcing solutions.

As our digital world becomes more involved, you can’t really count on people to drive to a physical auction site anymore.

So with that in mind, what does a modern auction look like? We can tell you, because we have spent quite some time getting our resources together.

A lot of it has to do with aggregating data and presenting it on a transparent dashboard. That is, in some ways, job number one, though people who have run auctions know that there tends to be lots of “jobs number one” as the checklist gets longer. Anyway, having the right tools helps.

Real-Time Reporting

At Perfect Silent Auction, we use specialized tools to take the auction data and put it into transparent Excel spreadsheets. This real time reporting makes it easier to monitor what’s going on with auction items and who’s involved.

At its core, an auction is an organizational event, so it makes sense to have the best tools to organize it well.

Otherwise you’re just kind of shooting in the dark, and to make things worse, if you don’t have the right interface for the people who are going to buy, you won’t get the same robust audience.

Anybody who has run an auction is how important that is.

This process also helps people to not feel overwhelmed by all of the nuts and bolts of arranging an auction event.

Let’s face it – it can be a lengthy process with a lot of moving parts.

So take a look and check out Perfect Silent Auction. We can help you to make sure that your auction event runs smoothly, on the power of modern technology. Let’s talk about it if you have any questions. We understand the pressure that event planning puts people under. We get it. The good news is that you can really utilize some efficiencies to save yourself a lot of headaches. It’s exciting, in a way, and we’ll keep talking about all of these features, and more on the blog to highlight how we help people feel confident about auctions!