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.

As a result of the downturn in the economy, many events are finding it more difficult to get auction donations. In many cases the number of donations has declined, or the quality of some of the donations has declined. Still wanting to fill their auction with good lots, many events turn to consigned auction items as a way to round out their auction.

Do your research before adding consigned auction lots to your auction. In many cases you can get better deals on your own, if you are simply willing to do the legwork. In other cases, a lot that makes sense for an East-coast auction may not be well-suited to a West-coast event. These days many hotel properties are struggling to stay at capacity, and are willing to make deals if you deal direct. But in many cases, you don’t have to look very far to find ways to do better than the consignment companies.

One such example is Winspire’s “America’s Cup Stars & Stripes Experience in San Diego 4-Night Package with Airfare for Two” which they value at $5,618.00 and sell to events for $1,750.00.

The package includes round-trip coach airfare from anywhere in the U.S. on American Airlines, four nights at Hyatt Regency Mission Bay Spa & Marina, and a 150-minute sailing experience on Dennis Conner’s Stars and Stripes. The first time I encountered this lot, I thought the value must really be in the sailing experience. Not so.

Anyone can sign up to sail on the Stars and Stripes for $99 per person. You need to be willing to do your research and book your trip yourself. Given that Stars and Stripes offers gift certificates, it means you can secure the package without having to book the date for your winning bidder.

The Mission Bay Hyatt? I managed to find suites available at $239 per night at the height of the season. So far, this $5,618.00 package has an actual cost of $1,156.00 before taxes. Actual cost is probably closer to $1,260.00 after California takes its cut.

So the difference in value that Winspire brings to the table on this particular lot is in the airfare. Two round-trip tickets on American to San Diego for $500 is a bargain if you are coming from New York city. Cross-country flights on American to San Diego cost an average of $500 per person. If you are a New York school putting together an auction package, this lot makes sense for you.

However, Bay Area auctions would be remiss to purchase this lot based on airfare, for myriad reasons. Foremost is the fact that American doesn’t fly direct to San Diego from San Francisco. Any flight on American to San Diego would require a trip to Seattle, Chicago, or Dallas first - resulting in a 9-hour flight. The other major factor is Southwest, which flies non-stop between SF and San Diego multiple times a day, for an average of $120/person, round-trip.

Furthermore, a surprisingly large number of auction lot winners never actually redeem their lots. One event we asked to track the data reported that 45% of their winning bidders did not redeem their getaways purchased in the live auction.

The vast majority of consignment houses require that you purchase the certificate as soon as the auction is over. If your bidder doesn’t redeem the trip before the expiration date, the consignment company keeps the money and your event is out the cash. We discussed this with the Gavel Group at their inception, and they refuse to budge: A buyer’s lack of redemption is their pure-profit.

Over at Winspire, Jeff Cova is more understanding and will often work with winning bidders to extend the deadline. He’s not out to sell vapor, and is more interested in people actually redeeming their trips since he has to buy them from the various airlines, hotels, etc.

The major issue with this is that when one of your donors doesn’t redeem a trip the consignment houses make a profit. A profit that your bidder assumed was going straight to your cause when they made the bid and then opted not to take the trip. When you consign an item to your auction there is no viable way around this, and it is a risk you have to be willing to take. Some auctions opt to include the actual costs of the items they are paying for in the description. It certainly sheds a new light upon a lot when donors know how much of the money is actually going to the charity - I’m not 100% certain that light is favorable.

One other big package being offered at the original writing of this post was a trip to the  2009 Super Bowl XLIII in Tampa. It included a 3-Night Stay and First/Business Airfare for Two at a cost of $19,000.00 to the buyer. Included in the package were round-trip, first class airfare on American, three nights at the Ginn Reunion Resort, and two tickets to SuperBowl XLIII.

The Ginn Resort was, as of the original writing, offering villas for $279 per night, with many still available. SuperBowl Tickets had hit a 15-year low at that point, and were currently reselling for as low as $1,500.00 per ticket. The same section the consignment houses was offering were currently at $1,800.00 per ticket. Total cost to this point if you wanted to put it together yourself was: $4,437.00, not counting airfare (anyone want to hit the SuperBowl next weekend?). If you were to simply sell this package on your own, without airfare, you’d immediately save $15,000.00 off of what the consignment houses wanted to charge you.

To be ultimately fair to the consignment houses, I opted to research first-class flights, less than one week from the date of flight. American Airlines wouldn’t quote a fee, but I found unrestricted first-class on United for $1,600.00 per person. Meaning that you could put that package together for $7,637.00 on your own - at a savings of more than $11,000.00 off of the consignment house’s price.

Jeff Cova will point out that one of the main benefits of working with Winspire is the fact that they are experienced concierges: they will take care of your buyers, period stop. And the last thing you want are unhappy bidders, especially unhappy bidders who have spent significant amounts of money on prime auction packages.

To make matters worse, there are auction companies out there that purchase lots from consignment houses and then resell them to auctions for a significant profit. One auction house offers the Stars and Stripes package to events they work with for a cost of $3,000.00. I know because one of my clients hired them to do a silent auction, and this other firm “offered” to consign a Stars and Stripes package for $3,000.00 into the live auction. My client agreed before doing any research on the lot (or turning me loose to look it up). When I compared the write-up the firm provided me to the .pdf available on Winspire’s web site, they were exactly the same, word for word.

I understand the need to make your auction better, and encourage you to follow our guideline of 1 to 3 when spending money on an auction lot. In today’s economic environment there may be even better deals to be found out there than the above examples, which were researched solely online. A quick phone call to the Hyatt in Mission Bay, for example, may yield significant discounts, and nothing trumps interpersonal relationships.

The point being, if you have to pay for auction lots do your research. Make an honest evaluation of your crowd and the lots available. If an auction lot being offered for consignment seems over-priced or too good to be true, it probably is. But if an offering and price-point map well to your crowd and fill a much-needed gap in your auction, no-one will blame you for bringing in some professional help.

One of the events I had the privlege of working with last year was Web 2.0 Summit, put on by O’Reilly Media and techweb in the first week of November.  2008 marked the fifth Web 2.0 Summit, and the first time that they opted to do any sort of fundraising in conjunction with the conference.

The decision to hold an auction benefiting technology-related charities was made just a few months before the event. And while the connection between the conference and philanthropy seemed straight forward, no one was sure how it would fly with attendees–especially given the economic turmoil at that time.

We held an auction on the first night of the conference, at the end of a dinner which followed the keynote address. There were a number of logistical challenges: we had to move the entire crowd from one room to another between the entree and the dessert course; we started the auction immediately after a 45-minute onstage interview of Lance Armstrong; the number of lots was limited; and the fund a need was being split amongst all three charities.

When the dust settled, we’d raised over $75,000 on just eight lots and a fund a need. Not a record-setting auction but definitely life changing for any of the individuals served by those charities. And definitely a success given the lead-time we had to plan and implement the auction.

I was surprised in our follow-up meeting when I found out that they were debating whether or not to hold the auction again. Some said that the amount of time it took to plan and implement was simply too great. Others felt like it had been a success worth doing better. I had one simple question: other than staff time, what did the auction cost the conference? In other words, did attendees spend less money elsewhere at the conference because of their involvement in the auction?

Answer: no. Other than the planning and implementation, the auction cost the conference nothing. It cost Tim O’Reilly some money because of his personal support of the fund a need, but beyond that it didn’t affect the conference.

To which my response was hold that auction! Do it! Not because I want the work, but because it is incumbent upon them to continue to make the world a better place, now that they know they can.

There are many ways that Web 2.0 Summit, O’Reilly and techweb could get better mileage out of the auction and, in turn, make the staff time expenditure on their end more worth it. They could have had Al Gore present the check from the auction to the CEO of one of the charities at his speech on Friday. They could use video-blog updates to show how Web 2.0 Summit’s auction continues to impact people’s lives throughout the year. And while all of that is important, it’s not the point.

The potential of any given crowd of people has a finite lifespan: If you do not capitalize upon it at that very moment, it dissipates. Completely. The Web 2.0 Summit auction proved that they have a roomful of attendees who are capable of changing many lives, and readily willing to do so. If they forgo their auction in 2009, they effectively send all of that philanthropic potential away with no guarantee that anyone else will ever be able to make good use of it.

If the question you are wrestling with in 2009 is whether or not to hold your auction, answer me this: what lives does your event change, and who will change them if you don’t?

One of our consulting services most utilized by clients is helping put the live auction lots in order. We always strive to create a natural flow to a live auction that readily engages the audience and builds to the ultimate climax, the fund a need. Our ability to do this is based on our knowledge of the flow of auctions and an understanding of the value of the live auction lots themselves.

Value plays an important role in the flow of an auction and in the capacity to develop a structure and narrative that works. There are a few simple guidelines, such as don’t open or close with your most expensive lot, and don’t place the most expensive lots back to back. One of the greatest challenges in ordering an auction is determining where to place those “priceless” items, especially class projects for schools.

One school event we work with presents a particularly unique challenge: nearly half of the 45 lots in the live auction are school projects. When initially confronted with the challenge of ordering this auction, we asked Kelly, the event chair, to assign an arbitrary value of “A”, “B” or “C” to each project.

Kelly took the time to look at each and every project from many angles. She looked at what they had sold for last year. She looked at the bidding history of the parents who spent the most money. She utilized ticket sales to identify which classrooms would have the most or least parents in attendance the night of the event. Kelly even applied a little subjective evaluation, to determine if something had any special appeal beyond what “only a mother could love.”

Kelly’s valuation of her auction was invaluable for us, and the event. It also showed a level of knowledge and creativity that underscore a few key points any auction could benefit from:

• Know your audience, especially your highest bidders
• Utilize previous years’ results as a foundation to learn from
• Approach event planning with a creative eye
• Tackle each task within the larger focus of the goals of the event

In Kelly’s case, this knowledge, focus and creativity resulted in the highest-grossing live auction her school has had to-date, including a record-setting fund a need, in the midst of incredibly challening economic times. 2009 is going to call for extra hard work to just make the same as years past.

Odds are, your auction benefit from some simple ABC’s as well.

It is important to make the most of the money you have in the room at an event, but doing so is not always as straightforward as it might seem. Every event has a ceiling, a maximum dollar amount that is appropriate for any single bid or fund a need pledge.

This ceiling has as much to do with the biggest bidders in the room as the people who can’t afford to spend a dime. In fact, it has everything to do with the relationship between them. No big bidder wants to stand out too far from the rest of the crowd. No one wants to make a bid on a lot and hear someone in the back of the room gasp, “that’s three months’ rent!”

This is one of the reasons we recommend doing at least 10 lots before your fund a need. Not only do we need to successfully devalue money, we need to make people who are willing to spend the money heroes and not fools. It is also why we recommend working with donors to establish the lead donation for the fund a need. There is more strategy at work than simply starting at the highest point someone is willing to commit to.

Just because one donor is willing to give you $10,000 doesn’t mean it is appropriate to open your fund a need there, especially if the high water mark for any other auction item has been $4,000 or less. We had $10,000 lead donors in each of the fund-a-needs for the past two events I’ve done. One raised $70,000 and the other less than $30,000.

At the former event, $10,000 was a completely sensible place to start the fund a need. We’d opened at $10,000 last year, and items have historically sold for close to that amount. When we opened the fund a need and started collecting pledges, three people raised their paddles: the same three people who had been bidding each other up on some of the big lots all night long.

The other event, however, was a different story, and a reminder of why bigger, higher, more is not always the best motto for fundraising. The ceiling in that room was around $4,000 - it was a highly corporate event with a few committed board members comprising the majority of the bidders. One exceptionally committed board member told me that he wanted to open the fund a need at $10,000 and get everyone else to come along with him.

He came up onstage during the ask, and challenged the crowd to match him at $10,000. Crickets. Nothing but the sound of crickets in a roomful of silent paddles. He quickly dropped to $5,000 then $1,000, put up another $10,000 of his own money, and threatened to pick people up and shake the money out of their pockets. All told, we made an additional $17,000 in the fund a need, on top of his $20,000. He showed great passion, but we did not make the most of his money.

If we had been able to work with him during the planning process and come up with a strategy, we could have given ourselves a better chance of getting more participation from other bidders.  For example, if we used his money as a challenge grant at the $1,000 level, we could have pushed for more participation from the crowd as a whole. There was no-one else in that room with $10,000 to spare, and they all knew it.

We could have then opened at a level commiserate with the expectations of the room, and not blown everyone out of the water. He could have been the hero for making such a grand commitment, and the rest of the crowd could have been made into heroes as well for rising to his challenge. As it was, he seemed pushy and everyone else felt inadequate.

Asking for money is hard. Asking for it at the appropriate level, firing up the room and getting everyone to join together to make something positive happen is a minor miracle. A miracle that requires months of planning, clear communication with donors, and an intimate understanding of the capacity of your crowd.