What does surfing a 25-foot wave have to do with active bidding at your fundraising auction? How is event planning like a storm over the Pacific? Join Reynolds & Buckley Fundraising Auctions, along with Greater Giving (formerly AuctionPay) for a seminar entitled Making Waves: An Alternative View of Fundraising Auctions at the new Pavilion By the Bay on Treasure Island.

Click here to register for this four-hour workshop featuring nationally acclaimed auctioneer and consultant David Reynolds and his dynamic auctioneer teammates Greg Quiroga and Ed Gold as well as company mainstays Colleen Buckley and Jacquelyn Wells. Together, we will share insights gained on the auction circuit and address the challenges faced in 2010 for non-profit fundraising.

We will also highlight the parallels between the work you put into your fundraising event and the energy harnessed by surfers in the ocean. The result? A unique new lens for re-examining your current event or for preparing to launch a new auction.

In our seminar we will thoroughly explore the concept of the “fundraising wave,” and look closely at the elements that give it power:
• The clarity and force of your message.
• The commitment of your attendees.
• The loyalty of the audience.
• The giving potential in the room.
• The excitement generated by the auction lots.
• The sense of community at the event.
• The pleasure derived from the event.

We’ll also look at the “shoals” of an event, or the accumulation of all the practical decisions made prior to it:
• Computer software.
• Check-in and checkout.
• Sound and light.
• Catalog options.
• PowerPoint choices.
• Food and beverage decisions.

Click here to register for the workshop, there is a $30 registration fee, which includes a buffet lunch provided by Wine Valley Catering. Registration deadline is February 16, 2010!

Date: Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Time: 10:00 a.m. - 3:00 p.m.
Place: Pavilion By the Bay on Treasure Island
For: Executive directors, board members, development staff and other volunteers involved with fundraising auctions.

Click here to register online for this Reynolds & Buckley workshop, or for more information contact Jacquelyn Wells at (707) 953-2834, or via email at jacquelyn@reynolds-buckley.com

All of the fees associated with this workshop cover costs for the hosting the workshop. Reynolds & Buckley receives no compensation for its participation in this event. All supplies and equipment donated by Classic Party Rentals.

As a profession, auctioneering has long had performance tied to compensation. Auctioneers have based their worth, literally, on their ability to market and sell assets for their clients. This makes complete sense in the world of antiquities, fine art, liquidations, estate sales, vehicle auctions, real estate auctions and the like, but it is unconscionable in the world of charity fundraising auctions.

A good collectibles auctioneer, for example, has an established system of creating a market for the extremely niche goods they bring to auction, and it is the capability of the auction house to create that market that earns them a commission. Sellers take their high-end antiques, art and collectibles to Bonhams and Butterfields because Bonhams has an established reputation and client base. Bonhams earns their commission on each and every piece they sell because they create a market within which they can sell each and every piece for top dollar.

The logic of paying a commission breaks down, however, with fundraising auctions. Fundraising auctioneers don’t single-handedly create the market at charity events. We don’t advertise the sale, nor pretend to be able to bring the bidders to the table. As fundraising consultants we work with clients to help hone best practices of bidder and donor development, and we put on an engaging show that raises top dollar at the event. But we would never attempt to claim that we are solely responsible for the bidders who come, or the attitude they bring with them.

Bidders at charity events support causes: they overpay for things they don’t need because the money is serving the greater good. Consider the bidder we frequently see at Bay Area events who will often indicate that he wants to pay more than the final sale price on an item, because he didn’t think it sold for high enough. As we’re announcing his paddle number and the amount he bought the item for he will shake his head and indicate that he wants to pay more than that, often jumping his own bid up a thousand dollars or more.

No auctioneer deserves to earn more because of a bidder’s commitment to an organization.

Charging a commission also muddles the motivation of the auctioneer. My goal at each and every event I do is to make as much money as possible for the charity, while maintaining a sense of goodwill with the bidders. That last part is crucial, because for an event to be successful the big bidders have to want to come back and do the event again next year. I could easily get more money out of each crowd I work with, but any crowd that felt as if they’d been bled dry would never want to come back and support that organization again.

Furthermore, there is no way of knowing when two big bidders are going to show up and battle it out over a particular auction lot. There are a few philanthropists in the world who are prone to showing up at various fundraising auctions willing to bid heavily through the auction, often spending more than $25,000 on  single lots.

If one such philanthropist happened to show up at an event I was doing and drove the overall price of the auction up $100,000 it does not mean I am inherently worth $10,000 more that particular evening (But it would be awesome for the charity!). Perhaps the greatest affront of all is the fact that there are auctioneers out there who charge commissions on the “Fund a Need” portion of an auction, but that topic alone is worth its own post, coming soon.

When the economy took a nose-dive in 2008 it made fundraising an even greater challenge. In 2009, it was clear that message that was king. As donors began making choices between potential events, cutting back on the number of auctions they attended, it was the events that effectively communicated their message in advance of the auction succeeded.

Successful events in 2009 were able to empower an audience to make a difference in the world by attending their event. Highly effective messaging led to highly motivated crowds who came prepared to help change the world, one bid at a time. But any event that took its audience for granted last year suffered dire consequences.

2010 is barely underway and the spring fundraising auction season has yet to arrive, but it is obvious that  organizations are going to have to work harder than ever to create meaningful and profitable fundraising events. Message will be important this year, but it will no longer be enough just to get a solid message together and use it to bring potential donors to your event. Successful events will need to create and celebrate a community that comes together to make something positive happen in the world.

Schools have an advantage in this respect because they have a built-in community, and they make the easiest example upon which to draw. Parents have a deep-rooted belief in the value of their children’s school, and most understand how important the auction is to the school. Successful school auctions are a chance for the parent-body to come together, party, and make something good happen for the school. At successful school auctions the big bidders are celebrated and the fund a need is the emotional high-point of the evening.

If your event doesn’t have a built-in community it simply means that you have to work harder to create a community. Community can exist year-round, it can come together for one night or an extended event. We’ll drill down into more specifics on how to succesfully create community at an event in upcoming posts, but the grand overview is that you have to find a way to bring people together to help you.

You have to make your attendees feel that they are an important part of your “family”, no matter what size check they write that night (the power of the fund a need is its ability to turn a mass of small pledges into incredible change, after all). You have to make attendees want to come back and do it again every year, and hopefully bring more friends. They need to look forward to the event, the gathering of people it represents, and the difference it enables them to make in the world.

In other words, donors not only want to make a difference, they want to surround themselves with people who are committed to making that same difference - at least once a year.

At a recent planning meeting where we were discussing repeat auction lots for an event, it came out that one of the donors felt seriously slighted because their lot was never redeemed. A buyer had paid top-dollar for the lot at the auction, and had yet to cash it in with the expiration date looming. The donor felt slighted, and was inclined not to make the donation again.

According to our calculations, as many as 40% of all auction lots purchased at fundraising auctions go unredeemed. This isn’t a function of the desirability of the lots being offered at fundraising events, but a reflection of the nature of supporting causes through auction purchases. People who make a purchase at a fundraising auction do so first and foremost because they believe in the cause; the desirability of the lot simply justifies getting caught up in the heat of the moment and (hopefully) overpaying.

Buyers assume that 100% of the money is going to the organization putting on the auction: if they don’t redeem the lot they will have still made a good donation to the cause. Most buyers also support more than just one cause, and often have shoeboxes full of certificates they keep meaning to redeem. Buyers aren’t trying to slight donors, they simply lead busy lives and have scheduling conflicts.

It is understandable that some who donate lots to an auction most often do so because they really were looking forward to making their event happen. There are a lot of possible solutions, such as putting the donor in direct contact with the buyer to coordinate the event, but they are all fraught with potential for disaster.

The simple solutions is to assure donors that their donation is loved: by you and the people who bought it. Their donation helped raise significant amounts of money for a cause they believe in. If the buyers haven’t taken them up on their generosity yet, it is not a reflection of how wonderful their lot is. It’s just more proof that we all lead insanely busy lives, and sometimes making time to show up and buy the lot is a major accomplishment, let alone making the lot happen.

Heading into the fall fundraising season, one trend had become readily apparent this summer. More than ever, the most popular fundraising auction lots sell relationships, not stuff.

We’ve long been advocates of selling “access” at charity auctions, and by that we mean “selling access to that which you cannot buy elsewhere.” Anyone can walk in to Michael Mina’s restaurant to have dinner. But a cooking class for two people where Chef Mina himself teaches you how to prepare a multi-course feast, followed a few weeks later by a dinner party at your house where you cook and Chef Mina is your sous chef is truly amazing (be sure to ask Ed about that one).

We used to include in our definition of access places you couldn’t normally gain entrance to. VIP access to a major sporting event, for example, used to sell fine on its own merits. But even those types of lots have lost their allure, if the buyer isn’t sure that they’ll be building a relationship while they attend it.

A celebrity golf event in Raleigh this past August provides a prime example of this. We had a lot that included VIP access to the Allstate Sugar Bowl in New Orleans over new year’s eve. It included airfare, hotel, and access to the Sugar Bowl, one of the major bowl games in NCAA football. We were never able to clarify exactly what we meant by “VIP Access,” so I simply compared attending the Sugar Bowl as Allstate’s guests to getting a tour of Spago’s kitchen with Wolfgang Puck.

When it came time to sell the lot, Dennis Haysbert, the official spokesman for Allstate, was on stage with me. He gave a brief overview of how incredible New Orleans is over new year’s eve, and how much fun the Sugar Bowl can be. We got the bidding going and as quickly as it started it was over: with only two bids. As I was selling it, Dennis stepped forward declaring that this simply could not be, and went on to explain in more detail/alter the lot on the fly.

Now Dennis himself was going to be your host, he would take you down to the field pre-game, then take you up to Allstate’s VIP Box to watch the game, and even join you on Bourbon Street after for a little partying. We started the bidding over, and this time it sold for more than twice what it had sold for before. Access to the Sugar Bowl was one thing, access to the Sugar Bowl with a chance to build a relationship with Dennis Haysbert is an entirely different beast.

The relationships you strive to sell don’t have to be A-list celebrities from Hollywood - but if you have said relationships, make the most out of them. The definition of celebrity varies as much from event to event a the organizations themselves.

The National Pain Foundation, for example, used to do a fundraising auction in San Francisco. Every year one of the biggest selling lots would be dinner with Dr. Eliott Krames and his wife in their home, prepared by them and paired with wines from their cellar. Dr. Krames founded the NPF, and for the myriad pharmaceutical executives and doctors in that room he was one of the biggest celebrities we could have found. No offense to Eliott when I say that if we took that lot elsewhere it wouldn’t have the same cache. Celebrity is a relative term.

When planning your fundraising auction, encourage your committee and board members to creatively think about all of the relationships they have. Is there anyone they know who people would love to get to know as well? Sometimes the biggest money-making lots are right under your nose - or on the tip of your iPhone, as it were.

The experience attendees have at your event is based upon each and every interaction they have.  From the moment they arrive until the moment they checkout, every volunteer and staff member at your fundraising event is helping set the tone for the evening and shaping your guests’ perceptions of how things went.

And while it is nearly impossible to make everyone in a 300-person crowd happy, it is possible to set an event-wide tone of customer service and success. Good customer service can make people forget the most egregious of errors, while bad customer service can turn the most innocuous of molehills into mountains.

Take, for example, the experience my wife, Michele, and I had on our honeymoon at an eco-resort on the Riviera Maya in Mexico. We knew in advance that our villa came with a CD player and surround-sound system, so we brought a sleeve of CDs to listen to on the trip. One night, well into our trip, we were blasting music and dancing around the main room of our villa.

There was a knock at the door, and when we opened it we found one of the resort staff members flanked by security personnel. He cocked his ear to one side, and then said to one of his compatriots, “Really? This is the right room? Well, I can hardly believe it myself, but one of your neighbors has complained about your music being too loud. I hate to trouble you, but would you mind turning it down a bit?”

Brilliant! I’d never felt so good about being asked to turn my stereo down, and I’d never heard anyone else make such an ask so artfully. I only wish I’d had his example to draw upon back when I was an R.A. in the dorms at U.C. Berkeley.

Contrast that with the sound guy I saw at a recent event. He hadn’t brought adequate equipment to cover the needs of the event, and was forced to crank up the volume on the only two speakers he had. Furthermore, he’d set up his speakers so they were aiming right at the tables in front of them. At head level. And these were potential big bidders.

As soon as one table realized that the speakers were going to be aimed at their heads all night long, they got up and redirected the speaker so that it no longer aimed at them - or anyone else in the audience, for that matter. When the sound guy realized this, he went over and turned the speaker back towards the table without saying a word.

As he was passing their table, someone at the table asked the sound guy if he could turn it down a bit. Without breaking stride, he turned his head and sneered, “No!” and went back to his mixing board. Everyone at the table was shocked. I was shocked. It was a level of rude that no one expected, especially in an event setting like that.

I tried to smooth things over with the table by offering a solution of moving their table away from the speaker and closer to the dance floor. It helped, but it didn’t fix things one-hundred percent. It certainly didn’t change the tone the sound guy had set when he snapped at them.

The screaming sound guy may be an extreme example, but it doesn’t take much to impact a guest’s mood at an event. All it takes is one rude waiter, a volunteer who is too focused on their assigned task to answer a quick question, or bartenders who spend more time chatting with themselves than interacting with attendees to turn one person off. And at an auction, the way people vote is with their paddle - or by withholding use of it.

Empower you staff, volunteers and vendors to create an atmosphere of positive customer service at your event. Each of them has the potential to make your event great for each and every attendee; especially if something goes wrong. The customer service they provide will define attendees’ experience. It will also impact the amount of money you raise, either the night-of, or at future events.

At more than one recent event, I have been handed a catalog with inflated values on the live auction packages. There is an inherent danger in this, as it stretches the boundaries of trust with bidders. The desire to establish a high value for the auction packages one works incredibly hard to obtain is understandable, but extremely high lot values can have a chilling effect on an auction. Especially in this economic climate.

A fundraising auction is in many ways an exercise in building and maintaining trust. Attendees come because they trust they will have a good time. They give you money because they trust you honestly need it and that you’ll do good work with it. You have to trust that your crowd will show up and support you at the level you need.

The latter is probably harder to do, but it is also the most important. It takes a big leap of faith to put yourself out there, to put all of the effort into making the event happen, and to trust that your crowd is going to come support you at the level you need. The moment you start inflating the values of your live auction lots, however, you violate that trust. It seldom pays off.

When the values of a live auction are inflated, a couple of things can happen. At best, people feel priced-out of the auction, and start paying less attention. This is bad because we need everyone to feel like the auction is somewhat inclusive, at least until we do the fund a need.

The worst thing that can happen if you inflate the values is that the audience turns on you, because they think you are being greedy. A few summers back I did an event that was lucky enough to have one of San Francisco’s most wealthy and highly-regarded philanthropists in the crowd. The people putting the event on wanted everyone in the room to rise up to said philanthropist’s level, and insisted on inflating all of my opening bids.

Our opening lot was a winemaker’s dinner for 12 people at a then soon-to-open Winery. At the client’s insistence, we changed the opening bid from $2,000 to $4,000 - thereby also changing the implied value of the lot from $4,000 to $8,000. Ridiculous. And I wasn’t the only person who thought as much.

One of the tables was filled with a bunch of bidders I see at many wine auctions in California and beyond. This crowd comes to spend money at an auction. I could see the looks on their faces immediately change when I announced the opening bid, as they all got pissed off and put their paddles down. That same table of people had spent over $30,000 at an event only two weeks before. That day, they didn’t bid once, not once. They turned on the event and sat on their paddles from the opening bid.

It affects my credibility as your auctioneer, as well. If I’m telling a crowd that the lots are worth X and everyone knows they’re worth less than that, people start to doubt what I say. And when people start to doubt what I say, they start to spend less, ultimately having the exact opposite effect of the original intent. There are many keys to getting people to spend more at a fundraising auction. Simply saying the stuff is worth more than it is isn’t one of them.

At the end of Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-award winning western, Unforgiven, Little Bill Dagget (Gene Hackman’s character) finds himself about to die at the hand of Edward Munny (Eastwood), one of the very criminals he’s spent his entire life protecting his little town from. “I don’t deserve this… to die like this,” Dagget says.

Munny pauses just long enough before pulling the trigger to reply, “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”

Audiences at fundraising events these days are completely unforgiving, leaving little room for error before they turn on or tune out an event. And like Munny said, “deserve” has nothing to do with it.

It used to be that if a sound system was sub-optimal, a crowd would work to hear the auction and pay attention. I did a school event this year that had an unfortunately horriffic sound system, and the crowd took that as their cue to save some money. “What’s that? You want me to bid on what? I’m sorry, I can’t hear you, my 401k is down 37% this year!”

The event finished down 40% from last year’s totals. We’ll never know for sure how much the sound system cost them, but I’d estimate that half of that is attributable to how poor the sound was.

Start the auction too late? Unforgiven. Have too many speakers or too large a program? Unforgiven. Put on a poorly structured fund a need that doesn’t spell out what you need the audience to help you accomplish? No matter how badly you need the money, this year “deserve” alone has got nothing to do with it.

We have always advocated thinking of your event as theater, and planning your event so everything that happens does so for a reason.  This year, that reason has to be focused more tightly than ever before. We’ve seen plenty of evidence to back up our theory that people are attending less events than ever before. And if they are given the slightest hint that something is amiss, they are ruthlessly tuning out and saving their money for an event that deserves it more.

Every event I’ve done this year, except one, has started off the same way: With attendees exhibiting an almost palapable, universal apprehension during the cocktail hour. I’ve had people come up to me and ask me, point blank, “What’s going to happen during the live auction? Is anyone going to bid?” The universal unspoken question, “Will there be any money in the room?” is suddenly so front and center that it is no longer taboo to bring it out into the open.

I typically try to make light of it, asking if they’ve brought their checkbook and assuring them that we’ll make the most of whatever potential is in the room. The reality is I’m holding my breath for each and every event, along with the event chairs, staff, planners and beneficiaries. The economy has everyone lowering their expectations to the point that we all become joyously happy if we’ve got two bidders on every lot.

Overall, events are down. We know that. At this point you should be aiming to raise the same as last year, while secretly accepting that a 25% downturn may be the economic reality of the times. The best event I’ve done so far in 2009 came within 11% of its 2008 total; but there is a success story to be found in there.

Planning on a challenging economy, the staff lowered food costs by over $15,000 by replacing the caterer with three restaurants who came in and each prepared a course.  The event then hired a freelance wait staff (and paid about 1/2 what they typically did through a caterer) to serve the event. The result was they netted more money than they had the year before, even on a lower gross.

The challenge with lowered expectations is to not lower them so visibly that you let your crowd off of the hook. You have to change how you talk about and ask for money, and any conversation with a supporter that sounds exactly like conversations in the past is going to be immediately ignored.

But if you are a non-profit that provides services for the needy,  demand for your services goes up in a down economy. In and of itself, that is a new way to speak about the needs and expectations of the event, while acknowledging the reality we all are existing in. The catch is not to lower expectations to the point that everybody shows up expecting everyone else to make it happen - a collective SEP Field, if you will.

It is always about messaging. It is always about messaging. And this year, more than any other, that messaging needs to be done in a clear, two-way communication. If you are dependent upon a select few bidders to support your auction, find out if they are going to support you this year, and if so, how much you can rely up on them. You need their help, and you need them to buy in to your event and your organization.

The number one question you should be asking isn’t just, “Can I get them to come to my event?” It should be, “Can I get them on my board?”

Reynolds & Buckley will be conducting a workshop entitled Fundraising Auctions in Hard Times on Tuesday, February 24th at the Volunteer Center of Sonoma County. Company founder and nationally recognized fundraising expert David Reynolds will be on hand to discuss the challenges facing anyone conducting a fundraising auction today, along with associates Greg Quiroga and Ed Gold.

This is the third year we’ve partnered with the Sonoma Volunteer Center to offer a workshop, and this workshop couldn’t come at a more relevant and important time. We will discuss emerging trends in fundraising auctions, share insights from the 50+ events we’ve done since the recession “officially” began last fall, and touch on the ever-important fundamentals:

• Laser beaming your message
• Donor development
• Bidder recruitment
• Audience empowerment

Then we’ll break up into roundtable discussion groups led by David, Greg and Ed to address the specific concerns of each organization’s event. Whether you are considering starting an auction or have a well-established event, you are certain to gain a wealth of tips and ideas.

Date: Tuesday, February 24
Time: 9:30 am – 12:00 pm
Place: Volunteer Center of Sonoma County, 153 Stony Circle, Suite 100, Santa Rosa, CA
Fee: $45 for members of the Volunteer Center of Sonoma; $65 for non-members
For: Executive directors, board members, development staff and other volunteers involved with fundraising auctions

Click here to register online for this Reynolds & Buckley workshop at the Sonoma Volunteer Center.

I feel compelled to note that all of the fees associated with this workshop cover costs for the Sonoma Volunteer Center and its programs.