Should You Print Values in Live Auction Catalogs?

After you have solicited your auction items and written the copy for the live auction catalog, there is still one final decision to be made: Should you include the fair market value of your auction items in your catalog? Most committees see this as a yes or no option – print the fair market value or print nothing. There is a third option that often helps accomplish the goals of the catalog more directly: opening bid.

In addition to being a marketing piece, the catalog helps set bidders’ expectations. Hopefully, the catalog helps bidders establish a budget for how much they think they’ll need to spend if they want to win a particular lot.

If you print nothing in the catalog, you give your bidders no clues for setting their own expectations. Pricing for items with an easily identifiable retail value can be looked up online. For any “priceless” experiences, however, your bidders will be completely left to their own imaginations.

The traditional option is to print the fair market value of each lot in the catalog, and while this has worked fine for many events, there are still two main issues with this practice. First, it has the potential to set a ceiling by stating what each lot is worth. Second, some lots are, by definition, priceless. Guaranteed reservations at a popular restaurant, for example, have literally no declarable value. But the perceptual value is often ridiculously high.  

“Priceless” can be an acceptable substitute for fair market value on a small percentage of your auction catalog. However, if over half of your catalog is an experience that cannot otherwise be purchased, “priceless” and all of its synonyms begin to lose their power.

Printing the opening bid for each lot in your catalog manages expectations, honors fair market values, and accounts for “priceless” auction items. Informing bidders of where the bidding for each auction lot is going to begin encourages bidders to do some of their own math without placing a ceiling on value. It also helps to manage expectations when an auction lot has an extremely opening bid by removing the unnecessary element of surprise.

Printing the opening bids also makes sure your committee is doing its due diligence by evaluating each auction lot to find a fair and enticing starting point. The opening has to be appropriate for the lot – and your crowd.

Finally, if you are going to print opening bids in your catalog, you need to commit to them. The power of the printed opening bid evaporates if your auctioneer consistently drops to a lower price point.

Sanford Marshall Joins Forces with Stellar Fundraising Auctions

Stellar Fundraising Auctions is pleased to announce a new partnership with Sanford Marshall, fundraising auctioneer and professional emcee. Sanford is the most recent auctioneer to join forces with Stellar and, though he is new to our team, he is not new to Bay Area event planning and auctioneering.

A professional actor on both stage and screen, Sanford’s range has been displayed in commercials for John Deere to onstage productions for SF Shakespeare. “I am excited to bring my unique style of auctioneering to Stellar,” said Sanford. “But I am most excited about helping even more organizations raise the money they need to serve their communities.”

“We are thrilled to have Sanford in our constellation of auction super stars,” said Greg Quiroga, founder of Stellar Fundraising Auctions. “His wealth of experience as a performer, event planner, and consultant will enable even more Stellar clients to realize the philanthropic potential of their fundraising events.”

An accomplished event planner, Sanford’s knowledge of the planning process enhances Stellar’s existing commitment to pre-event consulting and guidance. He’s already won over a variety of non- profits, foundations, and corporate organizations in the Bay Area and beyond, including the Olympic Club Foundation, Samsung, Montessori de Terra Linda, Friends of the Alameda Animal Shelter, and Ngozi Educational and Healthcare Foundation.

Make your next event a Stellar Fundraising auction. Click here to find out if Sanford is available for your event now!

Spring 2023 Wrap-up

The year is halfway over and the spring fundraising season is coming to a close. It is a good time to identify the fundraising auctions trends that have emerged, how they have impacted events, and how best to work with them to create successful event. First and foremost, we are seeing continuation of trends that started last year.

One of the most promising trends of 2023 is the younger generation stepping up and supporting charities at a high level

People are still waiting until much later in the planning process to purchase their tickets than they would have done pre-pandemic. This spring we saw a number of events come up against their deadline to confirm the catering order while attendees were still continuing to purchase tickets.

Check with your event venue and/or caterer to see how they’ve been addressing this issue. Unless your event is known for selling out quickly, be prepared to work to motivate ticket buyers as you come down the home stretch. And most importantly, know that this behavior is the norm these days.

Another part of the new normal is the volume of crowds remains louder than ever. Setting aside all attempts to analyze why this is true, the simple fact is once people are at an event together, they tend to be extremely loud. Crowds that are usually staid or reserved are loud, and crowds that are known for being loud are cacophonous.

Work with your A/V partner to ensure the sound system you have in place is designed to address this. Specifically, you need more coverage with more power – not just more power (think “auction surround sound”). Craft your timeline to ensure you are giving your crowd the time they need to blow off steam. Fine-tune your program so that everything that happens onstage is meaningful and engaging.

Auctions are getting shorter. When I first started doing fundraising auctions in 2004, the average auction length was 25 - 30 lots. That number has shrunk to about 12 lots, with many events strategically opting to do a fund-a-need only. Shorter auctions means fewer lots to generate the money, obviously, but it does not mean you have to restrict your auction to fewer bidders.

Buy-in-lots have surged post-pandemic and continue to be extremely popular, as I documented in an earlier blog post. As events opt to hold shorter and shorter auctions, buy-ins have become an integral way to engage more bidders *and* raise more money.

Another trend this year is the rise of the “sponsor a spot” auction lot. Similar to a buy-in, but instead of securing an opportunity for oneself, we ask bidders to sponsor beneficiaries of the event to participate in an experience (read a more detailed blog post here).

Crowds are also getting younger, and I’m not just saying that because I’m feeling older these days. We are definitely seeing a new demographic emerge at fundraising events, and the late 30’s to early 40’s set is starting to have an impact.This means you have to keep your program fresh and utilize forms of marketing that meet this market where it lives and plays. It also means that you need to develop a couple of fun and creative auction lots that appeal to this demographic – buy-ins usually fit the bill.

We are seeing events trend upwards again. Most events – not all, but most – are making more money than last year. Many are setting new records, after setting new records last year. This is partially the work of expectation management, of crowds expecting to raise more money each year. But it is also the work of development teams, boards, and committees who do a great job of setting individual attendees’ expectations for their participation in the event.

One disturbing trend we’ve seen emerge this year is fake bids: people making a bid and then either denying they made the bid or outright refusing to pay. This has happened at numerous events this spring, including at some of our biggest events. At one event, a bidder obviously and repeatedly bid on a lot until the lot sold to them for $36,000 – at which point they simply refused to acknowledge their winning bid and insisted they had not been bidding. Utilizing a payment processing system that enables you to tie bidder numbers directly to credit cards will help prevent this, but it will not make it completely go away.

Another great solution for this is to utilize professional bid spotters. You may already pay a premium for your fundraising auctioneer, but the additional cost of professional bid spotters will more than pay for itself, especially if you have a crowd of more than 350 people. Professional spotters help make the auction livelier and more engaging for the whole crowd, but especially those last few rows of tables.

Without professional spotters, we often do not know a bid was false until the lot has already been sold to that false bid. Then we have to re-open the lot, find the last bidder, re-engage them, and so on. Professional bid spotters can help verify bidder behavior and alert the auctioneer to false bids before they become problematic. They can directly engage with bidders and confirm a bidder’s intent (or lack thereof) while the auctioneer is still actively selling an auction lot. As few as one or two professionals “on the ground” in an auction can make everything go more smoothly.

To summarize: what we are seeing so far in 2023 are crowds that wait longer to buy their tickets, are louder than ever when they get to the event, and spend more in support of their chosen charities than ever before. These crowds are getting younger and require both programming and auction lots that map to their demographic. If your event has more than 350 attendees, consider using professional bid spotters to help make your event more successful.

Make a Lot with Sponsor a Spot

One of the most successful fundraising auction trends to emerge post-pandemic is the opportunity to sponsor an experience for someone else. Essentially, it is a lot where multiple donors can enable people served by the charity to do something cool or meaningful. We have typically seen this work well for service organizations that work directly with youth, but it is relevant to other organizations as well.

The lot usually consists of an experience such as attending a professional baseball game. Bidders pay a premium to sponsor individuals served by the charity to attend the event. The first time I encountered a lot like this was pre-pandemic, for a Boys and Girls Club. We had sixteen tickets to an A’s game, and we paired it with transportation and food for each youth, and offered bidders the opportunity to sponsor a youth to attend their first professional ballgame for $1,000 each. It sold out quickly.

Access to professional sports teams is an easy place to start, but there are many other opportunities out there.

Since then, we’ve seen similar opportunities with sailing excursions on the Bay, the SF Giants, the 49’ers, and more. At the Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Bay Area event this spring, we sponsored 45 Big/Little matches (90 people total) to attend either a SF Giants or SF 49’ers game at $1,000 per match.

Best of all, this did not negatively impact the fund-a-need. We still had the same number of pledges at the $1,000 level that we had in years past. It underscores that there are different types of donors: those who want to sponsor a very specific outing and those who want to simply give to the organization.  

These examples have been very focused on sports, but there are plenty of other possibilities: a trip to the Theater to see a Broadway show, a behind the scenes visit to the zoo or a museum, private screening of a film, and more.

The intent is to offer people access to something that would be meaningful to them – both donor and recipient. If you can partner with an organization and create an event that maps well to your people and your mission, you will be tapping into new potential at your next event.

Use Poker Chips to Make More Money (and Fun) at Your Fundraising Event

One goal at any fundraising auction is to lower barriers to participation and make it as easy and fun as possible for attendees to donate. One simple (and fun) way to do this is to use poker chips as currency at your event.

Poker chips with each bidder’s number on them are included with each paddle at check-in at the John Muir Health gala.

When you give attendees their paddles at check-in, include a few poker chips with their bidder number printed on them. Attendees can then use those poker chips to enter raffles, play games, or purchase items if you have any for sale. From a psychological standpoint, it is easier to simply place a chip in a basket than it is to pay cash (there is a reason casinos prefer to use chips instead of cash). It is also more fun for attendees to have a stack of chips and be on the lookout for ways to utilize them.

You can make the process as simple or as complicated as you like. The John Muir Health Foundation (pictured) provides each attendee with two chips, and only offers raffle opportunities. Attendees can choose to drop these chips in the bins for the various raffles, or not.

Another organization holds a western-themed event and offers event-themed items for sale at $25 or $50 each (think straw cowboy hats, sheriff’s badges and the like). At check-in, each attendee gets a small bag of chips of varying denominations that adds up to a total of $200, and can spend those chips on the various items available, use them for raffle entries, etc. If they spend all their chips, they can always get more.

Easy to find, easy to participate, and fun! This team selling opportunities for a raffle just needs one thing from you: put your chip in the box!

Take the process one step further, and enable attendees to use their chips in your fund-a-need. After your auctioneer has conducted all the pre-announced levels of the fund-a-need, give the crowd one last opportunity to make a difference. Volunteers walk around with baskets, similar to a “paddle sweep” or “paddle drop,” and attendees make contributions by throwing their chips into the baskets.

It does require a small amount of planning, but the logistics of using chips are straight-forward. You will need to:

• Acquire poker chips (available for about $0.15/each online)

• Print people’s bidder numbers on the chips

• Create opportunities for attendees to use the chips

• Have receptacles for them and volunteers/staff to actively encourage participation

• Create an accounting system for entering and billing all of the contributions

Staff and volunteers need to be prepared to help guide people through the process. “You want to enter a chance to win tickets to a Warriors game? Just put your poker chip right here!” As with any sales job at your event, the most engaging people are going to be the most successful.

Go all-in on something new at your next event! Make donating easier and more fun, and you’ll inevitably raise more money.

Check Out This Amazing Event Recap Video

By The Bay Health’s 2023 gala was a phenomenal success, and their videographer did an amazing job of capturing the spirit and generosity of the evening. Most impressive is the way they connected the motivations of donors with the gifts they made.

Watch the full video below:

And we are totally flattered that the videographer managed to make Greg’s fund-a-need cadence seem like it was part of the band’s performance.

The Hottest Trend in Fundraising Auctions Right Now: Buy-in Auction Lots

The type of auction lot that has seen the biggest growth and success in the past two years is the Buy-in Party. Also known as a Count Me In, Sign Up Party, or Buy a Spot: a buy-in auction lot offers bidders the opportunity to purchase tickets to attend an event on a per-unit basis. It could be per person, per pair, per table or even per team.

Buy-ins got their start at school events, where the community is tightly-knit and eager to get together and hang out with each other throughout the year. For many years, the perception was that buy-ins would only work if the majority of the crowd knew each other. Furthermore, many events believed that buy-ins could not generate significant income.

Bidders buying-in at the Boys and Girls Club of Sonoma Valley, 2023.
(Photo credit Melania Mahoney Photography)

But as larger auctions began to realize the versatility of the buy-in lot, they have evolved to become a staple of most every fundraising auction with which we work. Buy-ins give you the capacity to offer a lower level participation in your live auction while still raising the same as (or more than) you would with a single buyer lot.

In the process, buy-ins also offer bidders a “perceived bargain.” Consider a recent auction in Naples, Florida. The lowest any single lot sold for was $12,000 and the most was $52,000. We had a single buy-in for 20 couples that sold for $5,000 per couple. Bidders who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to participate in the live auction got to do so, and that one lot generated more than any other single lot in the auction.

This concept holds true for every auction. If your lowest selling lot goes for $1,000 that means there are people at your event who would love to pay $150 to be able to participate. Put together a party for 20 people at $150 each, and you have a successful lot and have engaged more bidders.

And where buy-ins were popular before the pandemic, they have seen a surge in popularity since. Auction attendees are thrilled to be back in-person, eager to do things together, and ready to get more social activities on their calendars.

If you don’t utilize Buy-In Parties as part of your live auction strategy, you are missing out on a valuable way to raise more money while enabling more people to participate in your auction. For more information on buy-ins, see our “how to” blog post, check out our list of great buy-in auction lot ideas, or contact us directly.

Summer Olympics in Paris, 2024: How to get the Hottest Lot in Your Auction this Year

The auction lots that sell best are those that offer access to your bidders. Access to that which they could not otherwise obtain or access to relationships they wouldn’t otherwise be able to build. Professional sports championships and – every four years – the Summer Olympics usually do exceptionally well in most auctions.

And while the Summer Olympics are always popular, in 2024 the Olympics are going to be in Paris, one of the most desirable destinations in the world. If you could acquire tickets to the Olympics now, and build a package around them for next summer, it would be a huge addition to your auction in 2023.

Obtaining tickets is always a challenge. You can register for a drawing to “win” the right to purchase tickets by registering on the Paris 2024 website. They will be drawing winners until March 15th, and offering each winner a finite amount of time to purchase tickets for various competitions.

The list of available sports and rounds of competition are varied and very few Gold Medal opportunities are going to be offered in this drawing. But you could still easily build a very compelling Summer Olympic package for as little as $30/ticket.

Tickets to the Olympics may also be available to high-level Visa card holders. It is worth exploring perks and offers to see if any of your supporters are able to get tickets for you.

Once you have the tickets, accommodations are the next obvious challenge. As of this writing (2/15/23), AirBnb had not implemented surge pricing yet for Paris. I was able to find a number of flats and apartments available in very reasonable price ranges. Hotels are currently only booking through June of 2024, so pricing remains to be seen .

Is this all a long-shot? Yes. Would it be worth it if it came through? Absolutely. The best auction lots, after all, offer access to the otherwise unobtainable, and the Olympics are the pinnacle of hard to get events.

The Top Trends in Fundraising Auctions in 2022

During 2022 we saw a return to in-person fundraising almost exclusively, and as the year progressed certain trends emerged in fundraising auctions. Now that the year is officially over, let’s take a look at the biggest trends:

Tardy Crowds

People waited longer to commit to attending fundraising events. There were a few events that sold out immediately, but most events saw a nerve-wracking portion of their crowd wait until the last minute to purchase tickets. It seems that post-pandemic, people are less willing to commit to an in-person event in advance. One possible explanation is virtual events required little or no pre-commitment, and people became accustomed to that. Or some people are still nervous about committing to anything, given the climate.

However you look at it, last-minute registrations are always a nerve-wracking challenge, especially with a catering deadline looming. Knowing that 15-25% of your crowd may wait until the last week to register doesn’t make it psychologically easier to deal with, but it does give you advanced warning that you should plan on some strategies to work with it.

Smaller Crowds

Less people were ready to return to in-person fundraising events. Some people may not have felt comfortable being extremely social, instead choosing to stay home and avoid crowds. Others may have simply moved on from the organization or event. Whatever the cause, most events saw a downturn in the number of attendees.

Smaller crowds did not mean lower proceeds in 2022

Loud Crowds

It started as a novelty as the first in-person post-pandemic events took place: Even though crowds were smaller than pre-pandemic, they were also louder than they’d ever been before. At first, we thought it was simply because people were happy to be back in person for the first time in years, but that energy carried throughout the entire year. Every event was louder than it had ever been before. Crowds weren’t just happy to be back in person in February, they were thrilled to party together in March, July, and November. There may have been less people in the room, but they were happier and more motivated to be there.

More Philanthropic

Smaller crowds? Yes. Louder? Absolutely. But also, more giving. On the whole, people donated more per-person than we saw pre-pandemic. Smaller crowds were able to achieve or exceed results from pre-pandemic events, sometimes with a radical reduction in crowd size.

San Francisco’s largest food and wine event reduced its crowd from 1,000 to 500 people and raised as much as it had pre-pandemic. A South Bay event with a slightly smaller crowd than “normal” experienced a three-times increase in giving. These are both extreme examples, but they represent a wealth of other events that had similar experiences. Overall, people who were willing to show up did so, with a passion.

Auction Lots Returned to Normal

Our answer to the perennially popular question “what are the hottest lots right now?” started to sound very familiar to clients who have worked with us for many years. Because what was hot in 2022 was very similar to what was hot in 2019.

Trips regained their popularity as travel increased. Dining and entertainment reemerged as some of the most profitable auction lots in live auctions. Experiences were popular again, as were relationship-based lots. One of the hottest categories of auction lots last year were buy-in parties (aka sign-up parties, buy-a-spots, etc.), which made a huge comeback post-pandemic.

You can see great examples of what was hot in 2022 in our annual list of the “Most Exciting Lots of the Year.”

The Death of Hybrid

The final trend of 2022 was the disappearance of virtual and hybrid events. You can read about this in more detail in this blog post, but the short version is people wanted to be back in person, not attending events virtually.

What will 2023 hold for fundraising events? Stay tuned for our next post on predictions for the upcoming year.

What Became of Hybrid Events?

When the pandemic first struck and virtual events became the go-to method for conducting fundraising auctions, hybrid events seemed to offer so much potential. Hybrid events offered many promises, including the capability to bridge the divide between attendees eager to be back in the room together and crowds that still wanted to remain socially distant.

Two years later, what became of hybrid events? The short answer is they never lived up to their promise. The long answer is slightly more nuanced. Once in-person fundraising became an option, would-be supporters were separated into two distinct camps: those who were ready to be back in person, and those who were not.

Hybrid galas never truly took off

The at-home crowd seldom met financial expectations, let alone donated or spent enough to justify cost.

The people who wanted to be in-person were really ready to get out of the house and leave the virtual world behind. They were eager to gather, eager to party, and eager to support the cause. If they couldn’t get tickets to attend an event in person, there was no way they were going to log on to a virtual gala: they simply wouldn’t attend.

Those who chose to remain socially distant were less likely to purchase tickets for an in-person gala, obviously, but they were also less likely to log on for a virtual event. Multiple times we witnessed organizations work really hard to appease the “at-home crowd,” only to see tickets sales flag for the online event. And on those rare occasions when there were a decent number of online attendees, we seldom saw the level of participation we were hoping for from the online crowd. Simply put: virtual crowds did not donate or spend much within the hybrid model.

Which leads to the final reason hybrid events didn’t succeed: cost. Adding a hybrid component to an in-person event at least doubles the associated AV costs, and more than doubles the workload for event planning staff. And if the virtual crowd isn’t going to show up and spend money, those costs simply are not worth it. We saw a fall ’22 event spend over $15,000 on the virtual component of their hybrid event, only to have 12 people log on to watch the show.

This isn’t to say that there were not successful hybrid events; there were. We participated in hybrid events where the online audience generated over $155,000 in the fund-a-need, adding 33% to the overall take. And another event where the at-home crowd donated more than the in-person crowd. But these events were the exceptions, not the rule.

By the time crowds could gather in-person again, they were all-in or all-out, there was no middle ground.