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.

Every event walks the tightrope between good party and successful fundraiser. If you don’t throw a fun party, no-one will want to come back next year. And if you don’t raise enough money to support the cause and justify the party, it isn’t worth doing next year.

A truly successful event has a unified vision from beginning to end that makes it fun to raise money for a cause the crowd is pre-disposed towards passionately supporting. Attendees should be invited to support a fundraising event that will be fun, not invited to a party and hit upside the head with an unexpected call for cash.

Everyone on your team’s vision of success should include maximizing the philanthropic potential of your attendees. There are always compromises, and I’m not suggesting that every event should have the same length auction start at the same time and feature the same lots. But I am wishing that event planners and event management companies would get on board with making auctions successful, and think about some of their decisions from an auctioneer’s perspective.

Case in point: at an event I did two weeks ago, the event planner put together a stunning room. Monarch butterflies were the main thematic element, and they were everywhere; projected on the ceiling, sitting on each place-setting’s napkin, and covering the three-foot high metal “tree” centerpieces at each table. From the standpoint of an event designer, it was gorgeous.

Guests at each table could readily see their mates across from them without the centerpiece blocking their view. And when you looked around you saw a forest of butterfly-covered trees. And that was the problem.

From the back of the room you couldn’t see the video screens through all of the trees, rendering the much worked-on video about the organization and its great work invisible to all but a few up front tables.

And when I was on stage, I was probably more voice than visible presence as well. Meaning guests couldn’t see me, and I couldn’t see them, or their paddles. I am most effective when I can look a bidder in the eyes and ask them to spend more money. That night, I was happy just to figure out where the bidders were. Establishing any sort of intimacy died on the branches of fifty-something Monarch encrusted trees.

I know the event planner and his team very well. I’m already carefully wording my follow-up conversation with them. Seeing as how this isn’t the first time they’ve done something like this at an event I was working on, I want to at least get them to acknowledge I have a perspective, if not see things from it now and again.

There are few things that can have as large an impact on a fundraising auction as the sound system. If attendees can’t hear the auction, they won’t bid. And if all they can hear is the auction, and they can’t talk at their tables without yelling, odds are they won’t come back next year.

The challenge is to set up a sound system that accomplishes the goal of creating an environment where everyone can tune in to the auction at any point…and party at their tables the rest of the time. It is an effect, really - auction surround sound - and it takes a professional sound company to accomplish it. There are many companies who understand the special needs of a fundraising auction; our longtime favorite in the bay area is Sound Expressions in Santa Rosa. They not only set up great sound systems, they engineer them throughout the event as well.

There is a massive ebb and flow to the noise level in the room during a fundraising event. A good sound engineer will be able to react to changes in ambient noise level and alter the sound as necessary. A great sound engineer will be able to see them coming, and proactively adjust levels.

Audiences are increasingly getting louder. Ever since the economy took a severe downturn this fall, people who don’t have the money to spend seem to be looking for any opportunity to party harder and louder. Watch the following video from an auction on September 6th to get an idea of just how loud a crowd can be. The lot sold in the video is the most expensive lot of the night, and it should have generated the most momentum within the crowd. As it is, you can barely hear the people who are into the event above those who are just there to party.

That was with the best AV company I know at the helm, manning the sound board during the auction. It is hard to imagine what that event would have been like without a professional on the boards throughout the auction.

Another recent event, however, opted to save a few bucks and go with a sound company that underbid by submitting a good looking list of equipment on paper that did not include a technician to run the show. The event took place outside, started during daylight hours then progressed into evening, and required PC and DVD video signals across four monitors. A tricky setup under any circumstances, but compounded by the fact that the technician left as soon as he had set up the system and sound-checked.

Two minutes into the video presentation something went wrong in the system, sending a horrible noise throughout the speaker system. The technician was 30 minutes away, leaving a bunch of volunteers to trouble-shoot and try to get the event moving back on schedule. After 10 minutes of frantic action, we got the crowd’s attention, re-started the video and got rolling with the auction. Thankfully, the passion of the crowd was more present than the sound tech, and the event was still a solid success.

But it raises a few key points:

• Hire a good sound company
• Get in writing that they will have sound engineers on-site throughout the evening
• Designate a point person for the night of the evening to be the main contact with the sound company

When in doubt ask yourself if saving a few hundred bucks is going to be worth the potential for catastrophic failure. If your sound system fails you, odds are your audience will forgive you, but will you and your auctioneer be able to find a way to quiet them down and keep them engaged? And with things the way they are, is that the place you really want to gamble?