Mission Centered Auction Items

Today, I am going to cover one of my favorite things to talk about: Mission-centered Live Auction Items.

What is a mission-centered live auction item?

A mission-centered live auction items is an item that you curate through your organization that represents the work you do. 

Why are these items important? 

Integrating Mission-Centered items into your live auction, creates momentum around the work you do. The live auction can get a little off track from your mission. As an auctioneer, I have phrases and tools to remind people about the purpose of the night, but I have yet to find a tool as powerful as adding in one or two (or 5) mission-centered items into the live auction.

Also, if you've build meaningful connections with many of the guests in your room, they are interested in the work that you do and these items have a broad appeal, meaning that there are a lot of people in your audience who will likely be willing to bid on them. This bids the price up, raising you a lot of money.

This is a great opportunity for you to show off some lesser known areas of your organization. I know that you have so many different programs going on within your organization, but your guests may not know that. This is an opportunity to talk them up and support them in a festive way.

BONUS: Usually these items cost you absolutely nothing to pull together, but they tend to cultivate competitive bidding and raise a ton of money.

Here are some examples of Mission-Centered items I've sold:

VIP High School Theater Experience

I loved this one! This was for a local high school. We were doing an auction for their performing arts programs and only had 4 live auction items, so they needed to ensure they picked items that would sell competitively. For this item they sold:

• 2 Front row tickets to their annual HIGH SCHOOL musical

• They provided valet parking

• They recruited a well loved local restaurant to not only donate a dinner, but also provide them with a reservation so they could make the show on time. This may not seem like a big deal, but to this community it was a HUGE gesture because this restaurant is a neighborhood favorite and NEVER takes reservations.

This was such a fun one to sell. It cost the school $14 total (the opportunity cost of 2 tickets), but raised a whopping $2,100! Every single person in the crowd was there to support the high school's performing arts program, so it started off with a lot of competitive bidding due to it's broad appeal. Then it was able to sell high for it's exclusive experiences, including valet parking (important at a school where there is primarily limited street parking available) and the dinner reservation.

Sponsor a refugee business idea

I work with an international refugee relief organization who ran with the idea to have an entirely mission-centered live auction (which paid off so well), but I am just going to share one of their items. 

They work with a refugee camp and one of their ideas to improve the lives of the refugees was to ask the youth/young adults to share an idea that would serve the people around them. They received 800 ideas from young adults in this camp alone, flooding them with ideas for businesses and ways to bring joy to the people in their communities. For their auction, they selected 3 ideas and gave their guests the opportunity to sponsor them.

• One person wanted to start a poultry farm so they could provide a larger variety of food and train others to make a living off raising live stock

• Another person wanted to open a salon where they could train other young adults to make a living as a stylist and then go forward and provide a service to the people in the camp that will make them feel beautiful

• The last idea was a language center so young adults could come together and teach each other their languages so that they could have the best opportunities for success

Each of these ideas were going to cost between $500-$800 to fund and make happen, so the organization was hoping to see them sell for $1,000 a piece. I sold this "auction chicken" style where I had everyone stand up and bid $0, then raised it to $25, $50, $100, $200 up to $1,000 where there were still about 30 people standing in the room. We kept going until there were only 3 people standing. Each opportunity selling for $5,000. We raised $15,000 in 5 minutes without a physical item. It was all about helping these young adults make their community a more joyful and beautiful place.

Private Facility Tour

I've mentioned before my work with The Wildcat Sanctuary. I like to reference them because put on a very mission-centered gala that has so much energy and support for the work they do. Their facility is not open to the public because that is what they believe is best for the animals they rescue, so at their auction they had several different items revolving around a private tour of the facility and their opportunity to see the cats up close

One of the opportunities was to tour their sanctuary in the winter when it is covered in a gorgeous blanket of snow and enjoy a beautiful dinner with a couple friends. Then you would get to watch one of their White Tigers paint a picture with their beautiful paws which the winner would get to keep.

I believe this item sold for $1,600, but then they offered two more opportunities, which trippled their revenue on this item to $4,800. Nearly $5,000 for an item that cost them close to nothing to offer! 

This is why I am so passionate about these items!

You do such amazing work and when I work with my clients, I just want to scream their efforts from the mountain tops, or in my case, the stage. These items give me this opportunity! You would be surprised how generous your guests can be. They want to know their donation is making a difference and this is the perfect way to provide them that opportunity.

How to come up with mission-centered items?

Visit this post and as you go through each question, ask yourself "how can I find an experience within my organization that fits in this category?" This will help you brainstorm so many items. 

The 5 Items You Need on Your Live Auction

It's important that your Live Auction has variety

If your live auction is all trips, they will not sell well. If you have 6 trips, it is unlikely there are 7-12 people in that audience who want them enough to bid them up. It's basic supply and demand. Not to mention it gets super boring for everyone involved

Here are the 5 items you should include in your live auction (in order of importance) 

1. Unique Experience

This is something they can't get anywhere else. This is super important for any crowd, but especially if you are hosting an auction for millennials because research shows (and in my experience), they are more likely to bid on an experience than on a physical item. The great part of this is that most of the experiences you can offer, require creativity and not money to produce. A couple examples that I have sold are: 

Sleepover/Lock-in at the Children's Museum. Opportunity to conduct the professional Orchestra. Unlimited access to 30+ collector cars for an entire summer. A tour of Jay Leno's private garage. Tour of a Private Wildcat Sanctuary. The opportunity to fund a refugee business. Beekeeper for a day.

2. Dining Experience

These sell so so well! People love great dining experiences. Usually the actual retail value of these are under a thousand, but they usually sell for several thousand dollars. 

You can approach this several ways. 

A Chef dinner in-restaurant experience. This is really amazing if you have a new and hot restaurant that has been getting rave reviews and reservations are hard to come by. A Chef dinner for 8-12 with wine pairings. This should a special menu created for this experience, interactions with the chef and be a very special experience. I have sold several where the guests would be in the kitchen or the wine cellar for the meal. This is a several thousand dollar item

Dinner in a prominent person's home. This experience would be if your founder or a public figure wanted to host a dinner party in their home. They could cook themselves or bring in a chef of some sort to their home. Guests love getting quality time with people who are usually quite hard to get an audience with.  

Dinner Party in the winner's home with a personal chef. This is where a chef (professional or a passionate amateur) would come to the winners home with all the food and prepare a meal for 8-12, including adult beverages, and then they would clean up. I have seen this go for thousands of dollars at small events where a teacher or board member is the chef for the night. It doesn't need to be a professional. It just needs to be a likable personality who can cook a good meal.

3. Trip

This could be a local trip or a fabulous dream destination. Either way, people love a get-a-way. Truth be told, local trips have been selling much better over the past couple of years. I'm based in Minneapolis and it is not uncommon for a cabin on the North Shore for a weekend to sell for more than a week long trip at a luxury villa in Mexico. 

Donated airfare is hard to come by these days, so don't let that hold you back from putting up a great trip. In my experience, the airfare doesn't bring much more revenue to an item, so go ahead and sell the trip without airfare.

My only rules for selling trips:

Must have open availability or at least flexible availability. Meaning, it is available for more than just one week out of the year. 

No Time Shares.  This falls in the same spirit as the first rule, but also they are just a pain in the neck to coordinate. No one wants to buy your timeshare. It's not a good donation. Just don't do it.

4. Sports Experience

This could be a wide variety of things. Great seats to a highly anticipated game. Meet and greet with players. If you received a ton of random sports tickets, you could package them all together in a "Year of Minnesota Sports" package. If you have signed items, make sure they are from athletes people care about. Michael Phelps signed photo = Great! A B-String Athlete who no one has ever heard of = Bad.

5. Alcohol Experience

This usually hits a broad appeal. This can also tie in with the meal experience. Brewing or winemaking experiences are fun. I've also sold many "Walls of Wine" where the board members and liquor stores all come together and donate a bottle of wine and you can sell it as a collection to the winning bidder. It offers a broad appeal which makes this a good item to start or end the Live Auction with.

DISCLAIMER: If your organization has any affiliation with addiction or you are a religious organization that does not condone alcohol consumption, this item is NOT for your group. There are so many more amazing items you can add to your live auction to ensure it is varied and engaging without including an alcohol-related item.

What do you think?

How does your current Live Auction line up compare? 

I hope this gets your juices flowing so that you can be ready for brainstorming some great ideas for your event!

What To Do With Great Items That Don't Make The Cut for Live Auction

Last week I talked about how cutting your number of live auction items in half will actually bring in more revenue. Even though you are only going to have 5-6 live auction items, chances are that you will bring in more than 6 great donations in the process.

What to do with the other amazing items. 

Items that don't "make the cut" for the live auction, will naturally go in the silent auction, right? Wrong. There are a couple of things You can do with these big ticket items. 

1. Use it as a prize in Heads & Tails or for a raffle. Back before everyone had an iPad, organizations were getting these as donations and the auction committee always wanted the iPad on the live auction. Here's the deal though. The iPad only would sell for retail value or a couple hundred dollars over. I guess it was exiting to get $700 for a $500 item, but know what is more exciting? Getting $2000 for a $500 item. By using an item with a broad appeal as a raffle or Heads & Tails prize, it was easy to engage donors to participate. Not everyone would drop $700 for an item valued at $500, but it is easy to sell 200 raffle tickets or Heads & Tails beads at $10 a piece. 

2. Have a SUPER SILENT Auction. Whoa! This one is exciting. A Super Silent Auction is run by the auctioneer (cough*Sarah Knox*cough) during the silent auction. Rather than bidders writing their number on bid cards or bidding electronically, they would call out their bidder number and bid amount to the facilitator to write on a white board. It gains quite a bit of attention in the last 5 minutes of the bidding. This is set up in the same room as the silent auction. It is a lot of fun. 

3. Set up a display for "Almost Live" or "Premier Auction" Items in the center of the silent auction area, or right near check in so it's the first thing guests see. This is good because it honors the generous donors of the items ensuring they get a lot of recognition for the items. If using electronic bidding, have this as it's own category so bidders can easily find these items. 

How to determine which items make the cut for Live Auction or not.

For this, I will refer you to my blog series I did last fall on the 5 types of items you should include to create a dynamic live auction.  Just because an item has the highest value, doesn't mean it should automatically be in the live auction. A live auction lineup needs to be curated with careful thought and strategy in order to bring in the most revenue.

If you have want to engage bidders during your live auction and throughout the rest of your event, contact me via the form in my sidebar --> 

Biggest Fundraising Auction Trend of 2016

What is the biggest trend?

The biggest trend I've encouraged this year has been (drumroll please)...

Fewer live auction items.

What's happening?

For years I've been consulting my clients that that the sweet spot for number of items in a live auction has been 6-12. Usually organizations have fallen closer to 10-12 items, but this year I've changed my tune. While up to 12 live auction items may have been beneficial for raising money in the past, now the donor climate is changing.  

Over the past several years, we've seen a rise in the success of conducting a Fund-A-Need at each event. The Fund-A-Need is a sort of live crowdfunding where everyone in the room gets the opportunity to make a difference by giving what they can. Usually (not always) the Fund-A-Need happens after the Live Auction. While Live Auctions can be fun, if they run too long, they get old and you lose donors' attention. The handful of bidders interested in the items will stay engaged, but the other 95% of the potential donors in the room will be distracted and become mentally "over it." 

While you are gaining a couple thousand extra dollars by adding additional live auction items, you are sacrificing potentially tens of thousands of dollars in the fund-a-need.  This is one of those cases where time is money, almost literally.

In a time where crowdfunding is wildly popular and effective, especially with the ever growing millennial donors, it is important to do everything in our power to engage the majority of donors when conducting the Fund-A-Need.

What is the right number of items? 

This year I have been encouraging my clients to stick with 4-6 items in their live auction. This is the perfect amount to get the audience's attention and raise some big bucks with out it going too long and loosing the attention of donors who aren't bidding but could be potential Fund-A-Need donors.

My clients have seen tremendous success with cutting their number of live auction items in half. Even with only half of the live auction items, this spring has been full of record-breaking events. Fewer items means they become more competitive so the items that ARE in the live auction tend to bring in more revenue than they would have otherwise. Plus donors are still fully mentally engaged during the Fund-A-Need which means more people participate. More participating donors means more revenue for your organization. 

If you'd like to learn how to make more money at your next fundraising event, contact me via the form in my sidebar ->

Must Have Live Auction Item #5: Sports

This the post in my blog series on Must Have Auction Items for a Varied Live Auction. If you haven't caught the other posts, or aren't sure why it is so imporant to have a varied live auction, you can find all of those posts HERE or archived on my blog. Stay awhile and look around. I provide all of this information to help my clients or anyone else trying to plan their fundraiser. My goal is to help organizations be as successful as possible!  

The last type of item you should be looking for as you solicit items for your live auction is a Sports related item. 

Criteria for a successful Sports Item:

Exclusivity. Like with any live auction item, you will have more success if the item is not a dime a dozen. Signed swag is good if it is by a well-known, well-loved player who does not hand out their autograph liberally. 

Appeal. This should seem obvious, but for some people it is not. If you are receiving sports tickets, make sure it is to a GOOD game with GOOD seats. Example for all of my Minnesota friends: 50 yard line to the Vikings/Packers game.  

Open Availability. If someone in your association has great season tickets to some local professional team, ask them if they would be willing to donate tickets that the bidder can select the date. A few black-out dates are acceptable, but still not ideal. This takes a lot of sacrifice on the donors part, but it's worth asking.

Best way to get sports tickets: 

Ask your company to donate. So many companies have season tickets that they give out to clients or employees as incentives. It does not hurt them one bit to give a set to your organization to sell. If they are less than amazing tickets, sell them on the silent auction, but still ask and take those babies off their hands.

If you have questions about your sports related item or any of the other sports categories I've listed in this series, please contact me and I'd love to dialogue with you about your live auction line up. 

Must Have Live Auction Item #4: Alcohol

I will start by saying this item is not for all organizations. Any organization affiliated with addiction and recovery or even domestic violance as well as some religious affiliations may want to steer clear of this type of item out of respect for the attendees. 

With that being said, items including an experience related to alcohol usually has a broad appeal. 

Examples of Alcohol Related Live Auction Items

Wall of Wine.  This is where all of the board members or auction committee members donate a bottle of wine (some bottles will be higher quality than others) until you have a collection of anywhere from 10-50 bottles of wine, and you sell it as a package. You will want to print any higher end bottles in your program, and ideally would print all of the bottles in the program so people can see what they are bidding. It is unrealistic and much less effective to verbally list all the bottles when introducing the item.

Wine Tasting. A private and exclusive wine tasting in someone's home with a professional Sommelier. 

Private Brewery Party. Local microbreweries are popping up all over the place (especially here in Minneapolis), but a tour is not enough because really anyone can go tour a brewery. A private tasting party at the brewery for 10+ people with catering by a local food truck (or two) would be an item worth selling on live auction and would provide an exclusive appeal. 

Wheel barrel of Booze. This item is always a hit. It is similar to the Wall of Wine, except it is an actual wheel barrel filled with alcohol. Arrange the alcohol so the higher end items are showing. You could also include glasses and garnishes (olives, cherries, frilly toothpicks, etc) in with the alcohol to fully stock the bar. This is an easy item to fill because auction committee members or board members would all go together to in contributing to this item. The winning bidder gets to take home their new wheel barrel and all of its contents. 

If you have a question about any of these items or want to know if it would be appropriate for you to add one of these items to your organization's live auction, please reach out and I will give honest feedback on your live auction lineup. 

Must Have Live Auction Item #3: Unique Experience

A unique experience is the hardest item to come up with because you often need to think outside of the box and pull your personal connections in for this. There is really no real criteria here other than provide an experience or an item that people cannot access on their own. So, for this post, I will just be listing examples of things I have sold to get your creative juices flowing.

Examples of Unique Experiences

• Character created about winning bidder in a well known author's next book

• Trip to visit and tour Jay Leno's garage (with Jay Leno if the timing was right)

• Principal for a Day

• Trip with a professional sport's team to an out of state game which included accommodations and riding with the team on their plane to and from the game as well as an after party post game.

• Lock in sleepover at a museum with a roof top movie

• Premier parking space for school pickup and drop off

• Batboy (bat-kid) for local professional Baseball team

• Box at a professional sports game hosted by a (well-known) retired player

• Timed shopping spree at a local department store

The possibilities are endless for these types of items. What I would encourage you and your team to do is to plan an entire meeting that is set aside for brainstorming this type of item. Throw out ideas with the freedom of "no idea is a bad idea" and just go with it. Some of the best auction items sound "stupid" in your head before you say it outloud and realize that it could actually happen with the connections in the room. Eventually what will happen is one member will throw out an idea, another member will know someone with the right connections and you will find yourself with a very exclusive an unique idea. 

Must Have Live Auction Item #2: Meal/Dinner Party

These are one of my favorite things to sell ever and every auction should have one. What I like about this item is that you don't have to be well connected to have this item. You don't even need to know a chef, you just need to have someone who is willing to host a dinner party for 6-10 people and cook food and provide wine. This could be hosted at a popular restaurant or even in someone's home.

Criteria For a Successful Meal/Dinner Party Item:

Hosted by a likable person. Not necessarily a famous person. Just someone that people enjoy being around.  If you have a willing participant, but their personality is just a little choppy or hard to be around, no one will bid. 

Multiple Courses. Hors d'oeuvres, salad, dinner and dessert would be enough, but if your chef can do other courses (soup, cheese, whatever else all those extra forks are for type courses) , that makes the meal stand out more.

Wine. Must I say more? Wine or beer pairings included are a must!

6-10 people. I have found that this is the sweet spot for number of people included in successfully selling an item of this type. 4 people is too few and 12 can be too difficult to coordinate with guests.  

An Expiration Date. This is important so people actually claim their meal with the donor. Usually one year from the date of the event is a good expiration. This is also out of respect for the donor and their time. 

Examples: 

• Chef's dinner at a highly anticipated new restaurant prior to the restaurant opening. 
• Meal prepared by a chef featured on the Food Network (seriously, there is probably someone in your area featured on the food network) 
• Meal prepared in YOUR home by the principal of the school. 
• Meal in the home of a CEO of a fortune 100 company in your area with the CEO and spouse. Meal prepared by catering company. 
• Authentic Italian dinner prepared by someone closely associated by the organization who grew up in Italy - secret family recipes. 
• Dinner prepared by a well known local chef. 

Again, these are all just examples, but the possibilities are endless here. Just start brain storming with your auction committee and pick whatever sounds most fun to you. Contact me if you want to my professional feedback. I will be honest, because I want your even to be as successful as possible.

Must Have Live Auction Item #1: Trip

In previous posts, I have offered the importance of including a variety of types of items in your live auction and listed 5 that should be included to create a well rounded live auction. Now, I am going to go through each category in more detail with the goal of inspiring you and your auction committee as you solicit items for your live auction.

The first item we will focus on in detail is Trips.

When looking for a trip to include in your live auction, you can include a local destination (something in your home state or a close state that bidders could access by driving), a non local destination (someplace to which they would need to fly), or both. For the most part, I would not include more than one of each in the same auction line up.

Things Good Trips Have: 

Open availability. Meaning the winning bidder can plan their trips selecting from a wide variety of dates throughout the next year.  It's okay to have 3 or 4 weeks through out the year blocked off, but other than that they dates should be relatively open.

WOW Factor. People aren't going to pay top dollar (or likely even bid) on something that doesn't have a special appeal to it. Some WOW factor examples:

• Home owned by a celebrity  
• Home on Ocean with gourmet outdoor kitchen
• Home in Central America which included full staff of maids, personal chef and butler for the week
• Unique home such as a treehouse
• Resort which is frequented by known celebrities

Experience is included. The trip includes more than just a place to stay. Examples I've sold:

• Napa trip which includes wine tastings at several vineyards
• Trip to New York with the opportunity to see a late night show and have a meet & greet with the host. 
• Travel to an out of state professional sports game on the team's airplane with the team.

Things Bad Trips Have: 

Limited availability. Want to make sure no one bids on your trip? Offer it for one week out of the entire year. Just because an item has a high "value" does not merit it to be on the live auction. We are looking for items with a broad appeal, one week out of the year is not a broad appeal. I would allow certain exceptions like if somehow you got a box with Madona AND Prince at the Kentucky Derby and it is obviously only available the week of the Derby. Otherwise, I would recommend taking your week in Florida through aunt Cindy's timeshare off the live auction. It doesn't belong there.

Off Season Availability. You will find many donors who are willing to give you donations for their off season. Win for them because it's a tax write off for the time a year they won't be filling their spaces anyway. No one wants a ski trip between April and August.  

What about airfare?

You may notice that I didn't mention anything about airfare in either section. I'll follow up with another post in the future about this topic in more detail, but the short: including airfare does not bring you it's value in revenue nor does it hurt an item's popularity if you don't include airfare in the package. Look back later for deets on this or just email me your specific question regarding this and I'll be happy to give you more insight. 

5 Types of Items You Should Have to Create a Dynamic Live Auction

Over the next several weeks, I will go into detail into examples of these types of items, but for now, I want to introduce the 5 types of items they should incorporate into their live auction.

1. Trips

This could be anything from a trip to a B&B 45 minutes away from your town or it could be a luxury condo in Mexico. I usually like to see a local vacation (something that the winning bidder could drive to) and a travel vacation (some place further away that is different from their local area...beach...ski vacation...Europe...etc).

2. Meal/Dinner Party

People love these items. It could be anything from a chef created meal in the winner's home or an exclusive specialty chef's dinner at a hot restaurant in town. These are great experiences for multiple bidders to go together on a great item. 

3. Unique Experience

A "Unique Experience" is something that people can't go and recreate on their own or buy from another vendor. These unique experiences are something that they only get because they are supporting your organization. This one is all about who you know and getting creative. I would recommend sitting down with your staff, board members or auction committee and have a meeting committed solely to brainstorming who they know and out of the box ideas. Remember there are no bad ideas in brainstorming.

4. Alcohol

People eat up (or drink up) these items. This could be an exclusive brewery tour (not one that they could normally sign up for) where they are involved in the creation of a small batch beer, or you could sell a "Wall of Wine," or a wheelbarrow of booze, or an exclusive wine tasting experience. The possibilities are endless. NOTE: This one is not appropriate for many organizations, so keep that in mind if it goes against religious beliefs or if you support recovering addicts. Please know I would only recommend this to you if it did not conflict with your organization's values.

5. Sports

Bidders love the opportunity to support your cause while being able to enjoy their favorite teams. This could be anything from a sports package with a couple tickets to one each major sports teams' games to a meet and greet with a popular player or even a signed jersey. 

For more ideas...

Keep checking back because I will be covering these items in more detail in the next several weeks. You can look for them on my social media accounts where I publish all of my posts as soon as they are ready.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact me through the form on my sidebar. I look forward to hearing from you.