Make Every Minute a Revenue Minute!

Strategically, it's vital to include additional revenue-generating activities to diversify your income streams. The three main revenue streams at fundraising auction events are silent auctions, live auctions, and fund-a-need special appeals. But organizations would still be leaving lots of money in the room without pots of gold, raffles, wine pulls, heads and tails, golden tickets, and all the other activities offered in this chapter. These extra revenue generators, sometimes called “auction icebreakers,” can become a cherished piece of your auction event. The best part is, they exponentially increase the fun factor!

Planned Spontaneity and Profits

At most fundraising auctions and events, there's a wide socioeconomic mix. Many guests who attend don't want, don't need, or can't afford to bid on a big-ticket auction item. But they do want to contribute and participate, and to have fun, too. By strategically placing a few carefully selected additional revenue activities into the event, an organization can engage everyone at a level that is comfortable for them.

You can't wait for people to create ways to contribute more or to have fun at your event. It's up to you to strategically and intentionally build those interactive revenue generators directly into your show flow. Think about these activities as creative ways to build relationships with your supporters. From an audience engagement perspective, your guests will connect in ways they would not have otherwise. Do you think parents and teachers will ever forget the generosity of the Parziale family or Courtney, their teacher, that night at the school auction? Guests still talk about the fun of helping to break records at that exciting auction more than five years ago.

These are not just lighthearted opportunities to raise funds. You are creating a whole new social dynamic with these activities, stimulating audience interaction while more deeply connecting guests to your cause. Plus, you make it easy for your guests to get to know each other and to share a communal, cathartic experience while raising money for a cause they love. From a donor development standpoint, it's this kind of meaningful, exciting engagement that builds loyalty.

Add More Fun

People spend more money when they're enjoying themselves. And fun is an important factor in the success of your benefit auction events. Why? Recently, the National Auctioneers Association (NAA) commissioned a national study by Morpace, a market research and consulting company, to identify why people attend any type of auction (i.e., benefit, real estate, antique). The results showed that 92 percent of the respondents identified “fun” as their reason for attending auctions.¹ Americans love auctions. In this chapter, we'll discuss how you can use income stream strategies to add more of that fun, and increase revenue and audience engagement at the same time. As Katharine Hepburn famously quipped, “If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun.”

Research shows that play is important throughout a lifetime. Including interactive games in your benefit auction gives guests opportunities to play together, and that will relax them, make them feel closer to each other, enhance their enjoyment of the experience, and encourage greater generosity. According to Stuart Brown, MD, founder of the National Institute for Play, “Nothing lighs up the brain like play. Three-dimensional play fires up the cerebellum, puts a lot of impulses in the frontal lobe—the execution portion—helps contextual memory be developed…”² This means that you can have fun, generate revenue, and create a meaningful and memorable event that promotes future giving (see Figure 14.1).

Fresh, Fun, and Profitable Income Streams

Here are a few fun activities to consider as additional income streams.

• Heads-and-Tails
• The Grab Bag Balloon Auction
• Premium Dessert Frenzy
• Auction Chicken
• Signup Board
• Gift Card Frenzy
• Centerpiece Auction
• Silent Auction
• Special Line Raffle
• Golden Ticket
• Pot of Gold
• Wild Card Auctions
• Mini-Live Auctions
• Make-It-Mine Boards

Heads-and-Tails

Heads-and-Tails is a fun coin-flip game of chance. It's a terrific opportunity for people to have fun and participate at a low price point, such as $20. This is a game of chance. The tickets to play are sold during the silent auction, when volunteers go around to each guest and ask them to pay to play, explaining that the winner of Heads-and-Tails gets a grand prize.

Let's say the grand prize is tickets for two anywhere American Airlines flies in the United States. If you have 200 people in your audience, you might get 50 percent participation in Heads-and-Tails the first time. Every year, that number will increase, because it's so much fun to play. But even if only 100 guests buy tickets to play at $20 each, that totals $2,000. That's pretty good fundraising!

From a strategic perspective, Heads-and-Tails is an excellent way to engage all of your guests, whether they are participating or watching. It's fun and energizing and a great way to involve maximum guests for a modest price and big results. And the shift in mood will carry through the rest of the evening.

The Mystery Grab Bag

The Grab Bag or, as they say in Ireland, the Lucky Dip, is a game of mystery. It's a fixed-price game, using something clever like a balloon, a mystery box, or a glass of champagne. There are countless ways to be creative. At school auctions, for example, they often use chocolate rulers with stickers on the bottom, cleverly titled: “Chocolate Rules.”

The advantage of Grab Bag is that you can sell something for a fixed price and have one prize, or you can use the Grab Bag to get 100 percent of the value of one of your silent auction items. When you analyze all of your lower-priced silent auction items, you don't really want items such as a $35 gift certificate to take up valuable space in your silent auction. Instead of including 30 to 50 lower-valued items in the silent auction, get their full value by including them in the Grab Bag. The Grab Bag offers a way to preserve valuable venue real estate in the silent auction for high-value and high-interest auction items, while maximizing the money you raise on lower-value silent auction items.

Premium Dessert Frenzy

Imagine five amazing, scrumptious, sexy, desirable desserts selling in the live auction for ridiculous amounts of money. If your benefit auction event is in a hotel where outside food is prohibited, ask the chef to make three of his favorite and most amazing desserts. Do the Premium Dessert Frenzy in a live auction to keep energy going. Here are some ideas. Consider a 10-layer “death-by-chocolate” cake, or a theme dessert such as a two-foot cake of the Eiffel Tower for the Evening in Paris Gala Auction; or a creatively decorated cake covered with the Autism Speaks logo at the Nashoba Learning Center Auction; or a signature tiramisu made by a beloved volunteer at your gala themed, Under the Tuscan Sun. Mmm. What would you bid to win your weight in chocolate, complete with a wheelbarrow full of beautifully wrapped chocolates? Get super creative!

Auction Chicken

Auction Chicken is a great interactive revenue-generating activity that can help you power through the live auction. Pick an item that's universally appealing and fun. Use the same criteria for prizes that you use in Heads-and-Tails. From a strategic perspective, you make it easy and fun for 100 percent of your guests to participate at a level that is meaningful to them. Plus, Auction Chicken keeps everybody awake and energized.

Start the bidding on a live auction item at just $1 and ask every single person to participate. Auction Chicken is inclusive, and it's fun for everybody who participates. The important thing is that you engage everyone. Be sure to have a photographer take pictures of your audience playing Auction Chicken. Imagine a photograph of every single guest at your benefit auction event with their bid cards in the air, smiling. This is the photo to tweet and post to Facebook during the auction, run in your newsletter, and display on your website.

Party Boards

Party Boards, sometimes called Signup Boards, are fun and lucrative. What if you had someone willing to host a lobster bake for 25 people at their home? What if you had a poker party and scotch tasting for 20 or 50 guests? How about a wine tasting and tour for 50 couples? What about a Ladies Latin Night for 60 moms at the Montessori school, complete with margaritas, Latin dancing, and Mexican food? These are all examples of creative parties you can sell during your cocktail hour and silent auction by using Party Boards. It's a unique and successful way for people who don't know anyone to get involved in the organization. It's also a great way to promote bidding for guests who are looking for an exciting group experience.

How do you decide if the item should go into the live auction or be a Party Board? From a strategic perspective, Party Board experiences involve a large number of participants, so they may be a harder sell in the live auction. Experiences with many guests lend themselves well to a Party Board sales strategy, because even a single guest or one couple can join the group and feel part of your organization.

Gift Card Frenzy

Gift cards waste space in your silent auction and often only yield 30–60 percent of their value. Collect all the gift cards and sell them at the opening of your live auction in a wild froth of happy bidders, all of them competing to be the first and most enthusiastic person to raise his or her bid card to pay 100 percent of the value! Here's another strategic twist on gift cards. Create a Gift Card “Make It Mine” display board. Offer each gift certificate at face value. Be sure to recruit and train gregarious volunteers to promote this board throughout the event for maximum audience engagement.

Centerpiece Auctions

There are many different ways to cash in on centerpieces. Regardless of how you sell centerpieces, it's important that you script your auctioneer so he or she knows to announce what you intend to do with your centerpieces and when you will offer them. There are several ways to raise more money from your centerpieces. Rather than just giving them away, try selling them—at a fixed price or, more creatively, in a mini-auction.

At a “guest centerpiece auction,” one designated guest at every table auctions the centerpiece to their tablemates all at once, live auction style. Offer incentive gifts for your highest bidding table and your top centerpiece auctioneer. Sometimes your professional auctioneer can warm up all of your guests in group participation with a favorite tongue twister, like “Rubber baby buggy bumper.” Strategically, consider this ice-breaker when you have extra time for fun and excitement and you need unique audience engagement.

Silent Auction Green Line Auction

Incentivize silent auction bidding by creating a raffle for anyone who bids on the green line of the bid sheet. This promotes philanthropic giving by teaching your guests to skip lines and go directly to higher bid increments. Instead of bidding in a traditional manner (e.g., $5, $10, $15, $20), bidders go directly to 80 percent! The green line is typically 80 percent of an item's value. For all who bid at that level, hold a quick raffle for a special prize to be drawn at the end of the event.

Golden Ticket

The Golden Ticket winner can select anything from the live auction. Volunteers sell tickets during your cocktail hour and silent auction. The Golden Ticket is a raffle, so make sure you get your raffle license in order. Because this is a raffle, have great volunteers selling the tickets. This can create a lot of energy, especially if you have a live auction item that's really hot! You'll have to do the math to figure that out. Let's say you are selling the Golden Ticket during the silent auction for $50. If the highest-selling live auction item is $5,000, you have to sell at least 100 tickets. Here's an interesting downside of Golden Ticket. If your winner selects an auction item that everyone wants and thereby removes it from the auction, you may disappoint your guests and introduce a negative element at the beginning of your event. Be sure to weigh all the options.

Pot of Gold

In the Pot of Gold raffle, a limited number of tickets are sold. Most commonly, 100 tickets are sold at $100 apiece, for a total of $10,000. The winner then has up to $10,000 in credit that must be used during the live auction and/or fund-a-need. As they'd do with a Golden Ticket, volunteers sell Pot of Gold tickets during the silent auction. The benefit of the Pot of Gold is that your winning ticket holder is not taking an item out of the live auction. Instead, she is given a credit for the amount sold in Pot of Gold, which she can use in the live auction, fund-a-need, or both. Pot of Gold energizes the audience, is a lot of fun, and gives a guest an immediate cash allowance. (Note: This raffle is for a “credit” and not for cash. Be sure to check your state raffle laws and always secure a raffle or gaming permit.)

Wild Card Auction

Sometimes people come up to me at a benefit auction and say something like, “I wish I knew you needed live auction items. I'll offer a week at my vacation home at the Jersey shore.” The Wild Card Auction gives guests an opportunity to offer another live auction item with one of the special Wild Cards waiting on their tables. Extra excitement equals extra funds!

Mini Live Auction

The Mini Live Auction is a special section in the silent auction that includes items that could have gone into the live auction. The Mini Live Auction is the final section to close before guests are seated for the program. It starts out with the last silent bid and then finishes live auction style, right on the spot.

A Word on Raffles

Before all else, check your local and state regulations on raffles and charitable gaming. Be sure to get advice from your legal counsel and tax advisors before you proceed.

Are raffles right for auctions? Most of the time I'd say not so much. Here's my perspective. When your benefit auction guests participate in a raffle, you create a certain mindset: “What can I get? With this, I don't have to pay much, and I can take a chance at winning something.” I call this the “raffle mentality,” and it has absolutely no connection to your cause. In fact, the raffle mentality is the polar opposite of the “philanthropic mentality” you're shooting for. You want your guests to be so inspired that they're thinking, “How much can I give? How can I make an impact for a cause that I love? How can I make a difference?”

If you're thinking about including a raffle in your auction, there are three ways to make it successful. First, do the math to determine if a raffle will raise enough money to be worth all of your time and effort. Calculate how much you can actually raise before you begin. Second, get organized and train an army of raffle-selling volunteers. The best are gregarious, positive people who know how to positively and consistently engage your guests, and won't be standing in the corner talking to their friends. Third, you must have raffle prizes your guests actually want, not just leftovers from your silent auction.

Great Fundraiser Warm-Ups

Warm-ups are a great way to start a benefit auction by selling nothing, absolutely nothing, and making sure that your guests understand your organization's cause. Warm-ups promote the concept that it's not what you get, but how much you can give. Imagine selling a glass of water. What about selling a $10 bill for $550?

At a benefit auction for the Food Bank, I sold a can of Campbell's tomato soup for over $1,000. Another time, I sold a deflated balloon that floated by my feet during the live auction for $500. Warm-ups are about energizing the audience for good-natured competition and philanthropic bidding. And warm-ups are great ways to remind everybody, “It's not what you get, but what you give that counts to make a difference.”