Dottie,
You will have some fun with those class baskets…I’ve been an auctioneer at over 60 fund raising auctions in the Maryland/Washington DC area, and I’ve seen the class baskets sell from $200 up to over $1000! Some schools put them in the silent auction…some in the live auction. When they are in the live auction, I might put 3 of them up at once, with the high bidder taking their choice of which one they want…the theory behind this, is that you involve bidders who each want a different basket, but they don’t know which one the other is bidding on…so it drives the prices up.
I also monitor and manage the closing of the silent auction tables/categories…and if there is one or two items that has a lot of last second bidding ( you need to announce this at the beginning and should have it printed in the catalog), rather than let the other bidders getting cut off because of the clock, I open those contested items up for a live bid on the spot…just takes a few seconds…and yields much higher prices on those items.
One more thing, if you haven’t already planned this yet…I would suggest that you provide a credit card payment system …you can either use a members account or I think you can get a "one time use" system, I reckon from a bank. This will result in people spending more than the cash they have on them or in their checking account. You could also shorten the check out lines at the end if you swipe the credit card info at the time they register, then mail them the receipt if they want. Without doing this…you can expect very long check out lines…even if you have 4-5 cashiers.
Well we are down to the last week! We have taken the smaller items and made baskets out of them. Say a movie rental, ice cream sundaes and added a ice cream scoop and dish towel to it. Since alot of baskets where donated to us (new baskets in every shape and size).That should speed up the auction a little bit. The items are still coming in... so we will just wing it the best we can and learn as we go. Being this is our first year and not knowing what to expect. We did in up going with a professional auctioneer who is volunteerly his time and service to us. So everything that is made during the auction is profit. With the exception of our bidder cards and receipt book. So not to bad. It's almost overwhelming the amount of stuff that has to be done at the last minute. The big stuff that is outside (sumo wrestling, bungee run, bounce house etc.) will be delivered and set up and ran by the company that has them so that is alot off our minds at this point. I'll let you know how things go... I'm sure there will be alot of things to change next year!
Here are some advantages of having a professional auctioneer do your auction:
*Their experience will provide a faster paced auction. *Their knowledge of values of items sold will enable them to know what starting price to ask for as well as how high the bidding should go. *Non-professionals will often lose track of who the bidder is or just mess up on what the current bid is at. Professionals also will keep going back to the previous bidders to keep them in the bidding. *Experienced fund raising auctioneers can also help in the auction planning with unique ideas that have worked well in the past regarding what sells well along with many other experiences that will help raise more money. I would recommend that you limit the live auction to 45 items or less, with the better items, and put the other items in a silent auction. At regular estate type auctions, a professional auctioneer will sell 100-125 items per hour, but at fund raising auctions may slow down to about half that speed. My experience has been that live auction items will average 60-75% of real value, compared to 40% or less for silent auction items. If you are thinking about doing an auction and need ideas for getting things to sell at no cost to the organization, email me direct This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. I hope this helps give you some auction ideas.
Well we are really keyed up about it and going strong. I think that the time won't be a problem. I know that from past experience (I used to be in the auction business) you can move items fast. If say we don't get a bid one a particular item I think I will set it back and use it for a raffle later in the year but I don't think that will happen. Most of the items that have came in have been high value items. But we will see... I'll let you know how everything goes. We are also having our carnival that day so it will be busy busy I'm sure
I'd sure like to hear about your experience when you are all done with this. I'll bet you have some valuable info to share.
Sorry, I don't know how the amounts compare, and I'm not an auction expert. However, I just can't imagine how you could get through 200 items in that timeframe. Some take longer than others, but say you average only 3 minutes each (a very short time!), that's still 10 hours worth of non-stop auctioning.
Please report back when you are done, so we can all benefit from your experience. And, good luck!
Well we are over the 200 mark in donations. We have everything from coffee baskets to weekend packages and everything under the sun in-between. We were planning on starting the sale around 6 and hopefully it would be over with by 10. We are also still beating the bushes for more donations. My question is does silent auctions usually bring in more or less then a regular auction with bidding on the idems? JHB thanks for your input into this.
