Creating a Structure for School Auction Success

05 Mar 2013 By Roger Devine

Come join our team, we’re really making things happen for our kid’s school!”

This is the sort of message that gets conveyed, year after year, by parent volunteers looking for others to help carry the auction planning load.

Unfortunately, too often a new school year also means a whole new crop of volunteers_… starting and recruiting from scratch_.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. The simple solution to the problem of revolving volunteers is this:

Create a solid structure once, so you can avoid wasting time re-creating the wheel year after year.

In other words, take the time to create “institutional memory,” which is a fancy way of saying get good at keeping track of everything related to your auction… so next year’s team will have a clear track to run on.

At a minimum, you’ll want to create a list of key team members who worked on this year’s auction, along with a brief description of their roles, so next year’s team knows who might have answers to important questions.

In order to generate consistent annual fundraising dollars to benefit your school – that’s why we’re here, right? – you need a structure that perpetuates school auction success and builds goodwill among your volunteers and your guests. Creating such a structure is the topic of this blog series, and you can expect to see weekly posts designed to assist you now and for the future.

Hint: you’ll want to print these out – beginning with this one - and keep them handy as you pass the baton to next year’s team.

Stay tuned,

Delila