Friday, February 25, 2011

Venue Resolution

We're staying at the place we originally booked, after lengthy debate.  This is a little disappointing to me, not in that I dislike the building, which I believe is a lovely place to have an auction. No, it's because this effectively caps our attendance at a level lower than I was shooting for.

I had hopes we could raise the attendance and thus raise the number of silent auction items (I always aim for the number of items to be 80-85% of the number of bidder numbers, so as to promote competition). But my aspirations have been met with some resistance from the parents on my team who have been at the school longer.  They claim our school doesn't really have a lot of people who come and bid, not a lot of parents with money; its a middle school and not an elementary, etc.

It's the tyranny of low expectations - too often in a situation like this, you perform down to the expectations, rather than exceeding them.  I really think this is the wrong way to go with a fundraiser - especially one that is as local in nature as a school auction.  This is last type of philanthropy people give up when they cut back - the giving that directly affects their community (and their kids!).

But I'm one voice out of several.  I now turn my attention to making sure we exceed these expectations, within the limitations of the ticket count available to us.

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Another quick donation

Here's another easy donation you can get for your school auction from the comfort of your home office.

http://community.tenmarks.com/

This is a link to a form you can fill out to get a donation of a one-year subscription to their online math-tutoring service.  Very cool.  Thanks, TenMarks!

Venue headaches

This school has traditionally held its auction at one of the local arts centers.  It's a lovely old building, and a great choice.  I reserved it for our event back in the fall.

I wanted to swing by today to talk to the event manager about set-up; I'd put this off for a couple of months because a) I had attended auctions there before, and b) well, life has been throwing other stuff in my way. Sue me, I'm a volunteer.

Anyway, it became clear today that our event is likely going to need more space than they have available for us. The room where we would normally put the silent auction is available, but not until 6:30 that night.  It has enough room to seat the number of people we had at the last auction (in 2009), but I'd like to increase the attendance and think I can.

So, I'm considering alternatives.  More news as it breaks...

The donations come rolling in

It's been an... eventful couple of months. I have not blogged as often as I should.  I will do better now, I promise.

My first mailing, of 75 or so letters, went out in late January.  Which is much later than I intended.  But I must be livin' clean or something, since the donations have been coming back fast and furious.  I've entered some of what I have received into our school auction website - go see what I've received so far (click the "Catalog" link at the top of that page.)

The mind-blowing discovery of the week came when I found this company: Versaic (here is their client list, and here is a shorter, even more partial version of the client list, but one with links to the company pages.

Versaic provides online donation-request forms and sponsorship-request forms for various national companies. Which makes them very useful to auction chairs like me.