At our auction, all baskets/prizes were made up to come to a minimum of $50.00 value. So for nice prizes that fell short of that minimum, they were bundled together as best they could according to a theme. We had quite a few food places donate $10 & $20 gift certificates, so they may have been paired with a pair of movie tickets, DVD's & snacks for a family fun package.

If your auction is for adults only, then you need to make some prizes (if not most) for the adults. Our PTO targets the kids all the time. At our Fun Fair, our little auction table is all kid prizes since its their day to have fun. But at our ladies night, the prizes are mostly for adults and that is why we have such a huge profit. The adults want to win something for themselves. There are family gifts and kids only gifts, but the majority centers around adults

I would try and convince your chairperson that pairing the smaller donations to make a more attractive prize package would increase interest and bidding or ticket sales. You need to market your prizes to draw the interest!

At our silent auction, we put out any items that could easily be displayed but would not walk off on their own i.e. signed footballs, gift baskets, memorabilia, etc). For all gift certificates, we set out a picture frame that held a typed description of the item that they were bidding on, including any limitations.

I have gotten several pretty cool donations (at least I think they are cool ) and instead of putting them out for people to actually see, the auction chair wants to shove everything into mystery envelopes and sell them for 10$. That's probably fine for most of the donations I've received but... This is irking me just a bit. I know we don't have a big space for the auction but she doesn't seem willing to combine things into baskets that would probably do ok. I think she really just wants to deal with "family" donations and display those. Any suggestions on how to deal with this? thanks.