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Creative Ways To Promote Your Online Silent Charity Auction

Are you looking for creative ways to promote your online silent charity auction? Whether raising money for a local cause or a global one, getting the word out about your event can be challenging. Fortunately, plenty of digital marketing tactics can help you spread the word and maximize donations.

 

Last year, over $326 billion was donated to worthy charities across the United States. If you want to reach the fundraising goal you’ve set for an upcoming online silent auction, you must realize the importance of promoting this event.

 

Read on as we explore different methods for promoting your online silent charity auction!

Develop a Website To Promote the Silent Auction

Creating your own website to promote your online silent charity auction can effectively build interest and drive donations. A website will allow you to showcase the various items up for grabs and their estimated values and help build excitement around the event itself.

 

If you build your own auction website, you should create detailed pages for each item in the auction and include photos. You should also provide an overview of the cause your money will support and a list of ways donors can contribute.

 

You can also build out content pages focusing on stories related to how donations have been used in the past or what impact they had on and their purpose. This will help build an emotional bond with potential donors. You should also include an FAQ page to answer any questions that may arise during the bidding process.

Use Social Media Platforms

Social media is a powerful tool for getting the word out about your online silent charity auction. With over 3 billion active users across all social media platforms, you can build an engaged audience of potential donors and increase awareness about your event.

 

When creating a social media strategy for your online silent charity auction, it’s important to focus on the platforms that your target audience is most likely to use. Share updates about the items up for grabs, post compelling stories about the cause you’re supporting and build excitement leading up to the auction date.

 

You can also use social media ads and targeted campaigns to build brand awareness around your event.

Email Marketing is a Great Promotional Tool

Email marketing is a highly effective and efficient way to promote an online silent charity auction. It is an excellent method for reaching potential bidders and inspiring them to participate in the event. Email campaigns are also great for conveying information about the auction, such as its purpose, the items up for grabs, and how the proceeds will benefit a worthy cause.

 

To build an email marketing campaign, start by designing a catchy and informative newsletter that showcases the items up for grabs in the auction and how the proceeds will be used. Consider including images of each item and links to more detailed descriptions.

Put These Tips To Use!

Promoting an online silent charity auction can seem daunting, but with the right digital marketing tactics, you can build awareness and drive donations. Whether creating a website to showcase the items up for grabs or leveraging social media platforms and email campaigns, there are plenty of ways to get people excited about your event.

 

Your Auction: Proper Use Of Reminders And Price Settings

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. 

Key Aspects Of A Successful Fundraiser

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. 

Silent Auctions – A Product Of Our Times

Why do people like silent auctions?

 

The answer has to do with the way business gets done these days, and how people like to approach fundraisers or projects for special causes. When you really think about it, the trends illustrate how we have developed commerce in specific ways that have an impact on our lives. 

 

First of all, take the classical auction, where the auctioneer is up on the auction block chanting away. Everybody in the audience has one of those cards or boards, and they signal their interest in real time.

 

That was a signature way to sell in the 1900s. Auction houses were all the rage, the thing of the day, and you would see them everywhere in American communities.

 

Fast forward to this century and this millennium, and you see a radically different reality. People are buying and selling online. They’re getting products shipped to them through the power of mobile commerce and responsive design – just by touching buttons on their phones. 

 

The Power of E-Commerce – and Online Auctions

 

We saw e-commerce continue to take a bite out of brick and mortar store market share over the last few decades. And as we ushered in the new millennium, we saw the Internet start to mature. All of a sudden it was possible to really see objects for sale on the Internet – to interact with sellers, and to perform more robust transactions with verifiable payment data. It wasn’t just “mail order business” anymore – remote commerce models started to look like the preferred avenue for most buyers!

 

So all of that got applied to auctions, too. All of a sudden you didn’t need to be in a room with the auctioneer. You didn’t even need to hire an auctioneer. You just used the power of the web to set up digital displays, and let the thing run. That’s pretty much where we are today – and it has unlocked a lot of potential for sellers. 

 

Tips for Modern Silent Auctions

 

We have some of the best tips on how to arrange a silent auction and implement one in your community.

 

We have tips about sponsors and donors, and tips about where to find items to auction. We have tips about collaborative work and how to brand build for this type of event. All of this helps our customers who want to promote a specific cause or idea through a perfect silent auction.

 

Really, at the end of the day, that’s what you need from a project like this. You need it to be perfect. But if you’ve never put on this sort of auction before, how do you know the ways to get to the result that you want? 

 

Take a look at all of the resources that we have available to make your silent auction all it can be. 

 

 

How To Boost Participation In Your School Fundraiser Event

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. 

 

Accessible, Virtual And Successful

 

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. 

 

Five Ways To Get Consignment Items For A Silent Auction

Let’s talk about how people source the items that they want to show off in a silent auction setting.

 

First of all, as we pointed out on the blog and elsewhere on the website, it’s important to have items that carry some value. It’s very hard to run a silent auction with extremely cheap items, or things that don’t reach out and grab your target audience. That just makes sense, when you think about it from the bidder’s perspective. 

 

So one quick tip is to associate the items that you get with the cause that you’re trying to advance, or the organization that you’re trying to work with. There are many creative ways to do that, and they are likely to boost your auction results. 

 

All that aside, where do you get these items, anyway? We’ll talk about that a little in the context of how you can use our modern silent auction site for success. 

 

Local Businesses

 

Some local businesses may want to be part of local public events. But maybe they don’t know quite how to go about that. When you do the initial outreach and ask them to be involved, it often fosters those kinds of connections that make sense down the road. So this is one place to look for silent auction items, if you’re stumped and just don’t know where to go. 

Committee Members

 

People who are involved in a particular cause or charity already have ‘skin in the game.’ They may be a place to go for silent auction items. They might have the perfect thing in their garage or basement that could be used to generate interest in one of these online events. Just ask!

 

Sponsors

 

If you have a local business that is already a sponsor, that’s ideal. You can get what you need for putting on the best silent auction around, with appealing items that catch everyone’s eye. That’s the best case scenario. But at least you can start building up a catalog of items to sell in a silent auction and get money for whatever you’re trying to do!

 

Buy the Items Yourself

 

Yes, a busy silent auction manager or management team can go out and buy the items themselves. One place to start is local thrift shops or places where items with some pretty good value may be sold cheaply. But it doesn’t hurt to sink some money into your silent auction items, either, because of the kinds of issues that we raised above.

 

Our Consignment Items

 

We actually have consignment items on hand for silent auctions. Ask us about how to access this catalog and think about it as an alternative for silent auction events that are going to be successful when it’s go-time. We have the right stuff to get your auction going!

 

What You See On Our Sample Web Sites

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!

 

 

 

Sample Web Sites

What You See On Our Sample Web Sites

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 web sites 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!

Real Time Reporting And More

Real Time Reporting And More

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!