We inherited some "homemade" auction software from a friend who put it together for his kids' school a few years ago and my husband, who is a software engineer, has been able to customize and improve it for us. Going online definitely increased the buzz for the auction, and it did allow families who didn't attend the gala to participate.
We can't accept credit cards using the software, but we just invoice people after the event if they don't have a checkbook. Peopel can also pay with Paypal, although I don't encourage it because we have to pay a 2.5% fee. Our software may not have all of the bells-and-whistles that come with something like Cmarket, but every single penny stays with the school and the PTO. For our little school (just 200 students), it's the right solution, but it does take a lot of time to manage things. We made about $14K on the auction last year. Given the terrible economy, we'll be glad to match that again this year.
A new feature my husband added this year was the ability for a defined number of people to sign up for a group event for a set price, rather than bidding on it. In response to the situation in Haiti, we're using that function to encourage people to sign up for a work session at a social service agency that works on creating food kits for starving children.
I encourage people to look around the internet for freeware or shareware that helps to organize charity auctions. I did search for "free charity auction software" and found a couple options right away. If anyone in your community has some programming know-how, they can probably adapt it for you, assuming it's open source.
I used i donate to charity before and had great success. I ended up paying about $49.95 and that was it. They didnt take a percent of my donations and I was able to collect all the money. We ending up raising just under 60K. It was great!
I priced out cmarket and they charged too much for my little school. I talk to several people that used idonate and also cmarket. They said idonate has all the same features as cmarket just not the auction items. So if you have your own items, same yourself some money and use idonate.
Cmarket is the company I was looking at originally, but they seem to take an awful lot of your proceeds between the upfront costs and then the % of sales. Of course they also have really nice items you can add to your auction risk free, so I guess it balances out.
I do have one question-when browsing current Cmarket auctions I noticed that all of the travel packages offered seem to be the ones available through Cmarket themselves; are you permitted to offer your own vacation packages, assuming you're able to get any? Thanks!
We have used cmarket.com. there are a lot of interesting features. we had buyers from around the US (which complicated delivery of items but it was worth it). they have a section where you can buy their items on consignment, so you only pay them if the item sells. it allowed families who could not go to our big gala an opportunity to support the school. we didn't raise a ton of money, but it was still a few thousand dollars. people were confused about the relationship to the gala. this year we are thinking of doing it all online.
they do take a percentage of sales and charge a set-up fee annually. you can track all sorts of things. they have pre-written emails you can send out to your email database. once someone registers they can send invites to their own emails to add to your database. you can add photos, logos, webaddresses so the donors get lots of exposure too.
i liked it and found it easy to load everything into it, once i got the hang of it.
if you have questions, i'm happy to answer as best i can!
peggy gala This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
