How to Raise More at Your Next Fundraising Auction

A post by Jill Boyer. Jill is the Director of Marketing at Greater Giving. Jill joined the Greater Giving team over 10 years ago, bringing her experience with event planning, marketing, customer success and copywriting. Her deep knowledge of fundraising trends and challenges are incorporated into many of the valuable fundraising resources Greater Giving has provided that have supported over 50 thousand nonprofit events and securely processed more than 4 billion in donations since 2002.

With a significant portion of your budget coming from your primary fundraising event, you may feel performance pressure as you strive to maintain or increase your goals from year to year. You want to maximize those fundraising dollars while minimizing costs and risks—but how do you identify relevant opportunities for improvement?

Without a doubt, the most important part of the equation revolves around your donors. Creating a high-quality donor experience at your event will help them relax, have fun, give more and open up to build a deeper relationship with your cause. In addition, streamlining your operations will help reduce your stress level and free up more time to focus on finding, recruiting and retaining more donors.

Organization

Whether you find organizing events easy or a challenge, using tools like this fundraising auction planner and visual checklist can help you keep track of all the complex and interwoven tasks required to put on a successful fundraiser.

If your event includes online bidding (which opens up your online auction to donors no matter where they are), you’ll increase the number of donors competing for packages. Be aware, however, that you may also become subject to charitable solicitation laws in additional states.

Communication

Communication is essential for a successful event. From crafting a compelling story about your cause and your event, to getting direct feedback from your attendees, high-quality communication is key. Most importantly, always be sure to sincerely and creatively thank all your donors, attendees, volunteers, sponsors and other key elements of your team.

Mind the Details

It’s the little things that can really set your event apart. When the tables are beautifully decked out and the event runs smoothly, your donors will feel valued and will open up their wallets. By the same token, when you take care of the compliance details for your event, you avoid pitfalls for your organization. For instance, make sure to double-check the laws in your state for raffles and liquor sales—these laws can change from year to year. Does your state prohibit shipping wine out of state? Does your state require you to state the value of an auction item before the bidding starts? What are the tax reporting procedures for your event? Make sure to stay on top of these issues, or hire a third party that specializes in nonprofit fundraising compliance, to manage these details for you.

Take the Extra Step

With a little effort and creativity, you can extend the fundraising capacity of your event even more. For instance, you can increase bidding by creating valuable packages and experiences. Do you have auction items leftover at the end of the night? Why not hold a “fire sale” to free up storage space and generate even more revenue?

In short, there are many ways to increase revenue at your fundraising events. Greater Giving’s fundraising auction planner is an easy-to-use tool that will help you think through the process. For more information on staying compliant with charitable solicitation laws, check out this white paper.