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Auction Listings Are Vital to the Success of Fundraising Auctions

Fundraising Auction Tip: You should always provide potential bidders with a printed Auction Listing of both your Live and Silent Auction items at any Fundraising Auction. A printed Auction Listing is vital for several reasons:

An Auction Listing informs bidders of the order of sale, and what is coming up next. If you keep your bidders guessing, they will simply not bid.

If bidders are not 100% certain of what they are bidding on, they will not bid. A printed Auction Listing should answer any and all questions about what is being sold in order to encourage bidders to bid as much as possible.

Bidders often need time to plan their bidding strategies, especially on multiple and/or larger value items. A printed Auction Listing helps them to do that.

Couples often need time to consult with each other about what they are willing to spend on something. A printed Auction Listing helps them to do that.

Potential bidders need to know the specifics, the benefits, and the restrictions on any item they are going to bid on, especially on travel and/or other higher value items. A printed Auction Listing should answer all of their questions, in writing.

After bidders see that they have lost an item to another bidder, a printed Auction Listing makes it easier for them to re-strategize on what else they can bid on.
Printed Auction Listings generally come in 3 forms:

Printed in the Event Program or Auction Catalog.

Printed on loose sheets of paper and hand-inserted into the Event Program or Auction Catalog.

Printed on loose sheets of paper and hand-delivered to all attendees, or left on each dinner table in the room.
Auction Listings cost practically nothing to produce and they can make the difference between the success and failure of a Live and Silent Auction. You should never conduct a Fundraising Auction without one.

A Case Study

Let me share a real-life experience with you. Once I was hired to conduct a Fundraising Auction for a nationally renowned organization. The event was held in a major hotel, in one of the country’s largest cities, with several hundred “black tie” participants attending. It was an extremely professional event, with the music, singing, lighting, speeches, and awards all perfectly timed and choreographed. Everything was done to perfection… exception the Fundraising Auction.

Although I had signed an agreement to serve as their Auctioneer nearly one year in advance of the event, no one bothered to contact me for any advice or help. Approximately one week prior to the Auction date, I contacted the group to see if they had replaced me with another Auctioneer. But they said that I was still their man.

Upon arriving at the event I asked for a copy of the Auction Listing. I was told that there were none. I’m not sure whether they felt that the Auction Listing wasn’t necessary, or whether someone forgot to have them printed. This was never made clear. When I asked what I was to use at the podium, I was told to copy the list of Live Auction items from a committee member’s computer. It took me about 30 minutes to copy three pages of hand-written notes in order to prepare for my role as their Auctioneer.

I knew that they had created a PowerPoint program showing the various Live Auction items. When I asked whether the PowerPoint slide order corresponded to the order of sale I had copied from the committee member’s computer, I was met with a blank stare. The committee member left to check the slide order, and returned to let me know that the slide order did not correspond my notes, and he provided me with the correct slide order… hand-written on a paper napkin. This forced me to re-arrange my three pages of hand-written notes before taking the podium.

There was a Live Auction Table with descriptions of the Live Auction items that were to be sold, but the table was not clearly marked, and it received significantly less attention than the Silent Auction Tables, which were clearly identified. Since the Live Auction Table was located adjacent to the “Raffle Table”, it appeared that most people thought it was part of the raffle and therefore paid very little attention to it.

According to the event program (which did not include an Auction Listing), I knew approximately when I was to begin the Live Auction. At the designated time the Master of Ceremonies announced the start of the Live Auction to the several hundred people in attendance, and introduced me as Auctioneer. As I approached the podium I realized that photographs of award winners were still being taken… directly in front of the podium where I was to stand… which required me to stand aside for several minutes until the photographers were done. Can we say “awkward moment”?

As the photographers cleared, I approached the podium and began my Live Auction introduction. Approximately one minute into my introduction, the “Raffle Committee” approached the podium and stopped my Live Auction Introduction in order to pull the 8 or 9 Raffle Winners. These drawings lasted about 5 minutes. Upon it’s conclusion I was allowed to resume the start of the Live Auction.

When standing at the podium two intense and extremely bright spotlights were pointed directly at the podium. The lights were so bright that I literally could not see the center 1/3 of the room. I could see the tables on the right, and on the left, but was totally blinded when looking straight ahead. It took perhaps five minutes before the spotlights were turned off.

While at the podium and describing Lot #1, I had to ask someone to start the Lot #1 PowerPoint Slide… because apparently no one was assigned that job.

So with only the Auctioneer’s verbal description, and a PowerPoint slide, it appeared that few people in the room had any idea about what we were selling… or when we were selling it… until it was announced by the Auctioneer. As a result, bidding was extremely light and the final results fell several thousands of dollars short of where they should have been
The learning experience is this:

The Live Auction is where you place your better items, and where the real money should be made at any Fundraising Auction. Let bidders know as far in advance as possible what you will be selling, and the order of sale, so they can get excited about the Auction, and plan their bidding strategy accordingly.

Auction Listings are absolutely vital to the success of both Live & Silent Auctions. In my opinion, revenues at this Auction fell thousands of dollars short of where they should have been, because no Auction Listing was provided to the guests.

If bidders are not perfectly clear on what is being sold, including both the item’s specifics, benefits, and restrictions, they will not bid.

When you have a committee of volunteers, especially volunteers having full time jobs and/or very busy schedules, the services of a professional Fundraising Auctioneer can help to keep the committee on track.

And once you retain the services of a professional Fundraising Auctioneer… use the services that you are paying for.

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Google AdWords Advertising Strategy

While Google AdWords advertising is not for everyone, I don’t think anyone could turn down $75 of free advertising for their site! Google offers all new clients a $75 coupon to try out their services. There’s absolutely no commitment to carry on, no automatic billing should you forget to cancel, no deposit, just good old fashioned free money! Simply do a search in Google for “Google AdWords advertising $75 coupon”

But, it Costs too Much!

Free coupon aside, the main complaint of most people who try Google AdWords advertising is the cost. People will pay several dollars per click through for some high competition keywords. That’s like paying several dollars for one visitor! I have a technique to lower that cost. I woke up this morning, logged into my Google AdWords account and saw an average of $0.14 per click, much better.

Lowering Advertising Costs

The key to lowering the cost of click throughs is with Banner advertising. While this takes a little more time to setup, you can generally hit highly competitive keywords at around 5-15% of what it would cost you for text ads. This is still the same highly targeted traffic as you would get from those text ads. I want to address two concerns you may be having right now:

· You don’t have to have a fancy expensive graphic design studio to make banners – you can download a free graphics design tool called “gimp” that you can design your banners with

· You don’t have to be a graphic design artist – I designed all my banners myself and I have zero training in any artistic discipline, it’s simply about getting your message across. My click thorough rate is around 0.37% which may seem low, but considering the average banner click through rate of 0.2 – 0.3%, it’s actually pretty good! (Source: Wiki Click through Rate).

Optimizing Banner Campaigns

Here are some general tips that I have followed to get decent click through rates at a low cost per click with Google AdWords advertising.

· Keyword Research – focus on 2-3 main keywords that are 100% related to what you want to advertise. Copy those keywords into the Google AdWords Advertising Keyword Tool to get some more keyword ideas. Try and build up 200-300 highly targeted keywords, as specific as possible to what it is you are advertising. This doesn’t have to be done all at once, but try and start with 50-100. Read my article on using the Google Keyword Tool if you are new to this.

· Banner Design – it’s even more important to focus on your banner’s message than keyword focusing. You want visitors to click on your banner that are interested in exactly what you are advertising. For example, if I am advertising whey protein isolate, I want my banner to convey exactly that. Not whey protein, not protein, not nutritional supplements, I want people to click on my banner that are specifically looking for a whey protein isolate.

· Bidding on keywords – Google AdWords advertising works on keyword bids. You specify the dollar amount you are willing to pay for someone to click on your banner. I generally keep the same bid for each keyword, but you can manipulate each keyword bid individually for more targeted keywords. Start off low, around 15c. If you don’t get any traffic after 24 hours, increase to 20, then 25 etc. until you get the level of banner impressions you are comfortable with.

· Banner Population – Google AdWords advertising allows you to upload various sizes of banners – you want to upload at least one of each size! This is important. For your specific market, people might be focusing on a 728×90 size banner, maybe a 250×250? Who knows? You want to exploit the banner size that people may not be using, or not using as much. For me it was the 300×50 size banner.

Here are the Google AdWords advertising accepted banner sizes:

· 300 x 50 Mobile Leaderboard

· 468 x 60 Banner

· 728 x 90 Leaderboard

· 250 x 250 Square

· 200 x 200 Small square

· 336 x 280 Large rectangle

· 300 x 250 Inline rectangle

· 120 x 600 Skyscraper

· 160 x 600 Wide skyscraper

The main key here is focus, focus, focus! Google AdWords advertising can be very successful if you generate the right type of traffic – targeted traffic. If you are general with your keywords and banners, you will get exactly that – general visitors, not specifically interested in what you are advertising!

Offsetting the Cost

I generally offset at least 50% of my Google AdWords advertising costs with another Google product, Google AdSense. It’s basically the flip side of Google AdWords advertising, you get paid for people clicking on ads you put on your site. Also flipped is the way I show these ads, I only show text ads because I receive a lot more revenue from text ads than banners.

One word of caution, apply Google AdSense tastefully to your website. I have one ad in my side bar and one at the bottom of each article. Do not plaster them all over your website if you wish to use Google AdWords advertising – especially not on the landing page that people click through your banners to. Your banner ad will not get approved until Google deems your site suitable.

I also want to stress something else about approvals. It used to be that the folks at Google AdWords advertising would approve my ad in a matter of hours. Recently it has been 3-4 days, so be patient when submitting your ad and realize it may be several days before it goes live.

Home-Based Business – Which One Will Work For Me?

With the tough economic times and the growing number of unemployed Americans, people are starting their own home-based businesses. Studies are showing that more than half of all U.S. businesses are based out of someone’s home.The question now is which one will work for you. Well, you first need to figure out what you are most passionate about. Doing something that you are interested in will be very important, because sometimes you need to try and get people to invest in your home-based business or spend money for products or services you will give. You will need the enthusiasm when you are trying to sell your services.Some home-based businesses need little or no start-up capital and will provide you flexibility. They could be up and running in no time.Here are some home-based business ideas:1. Affiliate marketing/eBay seller – This is one of the lowest cost home-based business. It is very simple. You just set up a blog and review products in certain niche markets. Also you can learn how to sell items on online auctions. You can sell items for your friends and neighbors. You can set up a commission.2. Freelance Writer (Ghost Writing or Article Writing) – Many make a decent living with ghost-writing articles, topic-related articles or short stories. There are many websites that allow you to offer your services. Most are free, but some you have to pay.3. Dog Walking/ Pet Sitting – This is mostly for teenagers who want to make some extra money.4. Business Mentor/Business Coaching – If you have a business background, you can start with local business and then expand from there. Most small to medium companies don’t have much money to start with. They will contract you to help their business grow.5. Personal trainer – If you’re fitness minded, you can start training other people in their homes or rent some space. Another possibility is to make some short training videos and sell them to your clients. It doesn’t take much.6. Blogging – Many people blog on a daily or weekly basis. There are a number of ways to make money, such as displaying ads like Google AdSense throughout your site, offering unbiased reviews of products and services and providing helpful articles about certain topics.7. Photography – Are you a keen photographer and have your own camera? Then you could look at making money. You can take pictures of people either at their homes, outside scenery or just products or items and you can sell them for websites who buy stock photos.8. Technical support – If you’re computer literate and you can help others with computer problems, you can make money doing that.There are so many ways for everyday people to start making money at home. People just need to take some time to come up with a plan to successfully have a home-based business!

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