Kicking Auction Season off right – planning 101

01 Oct 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. It speaks to our desire to support our kid’s education and to make a meaningful contribution within our communities.

Unfortunately, for many parents, working on a school auction can take more time and energy than we really have to give, which can leave us feeling burnt out and unwilling to participate next time around.

Let’s face it, school auctions have a reputation for being poorly planned and inefficiently executed, in great part because it can be difficult to get a group of volunteers working together in a way that is both effective and efficient. 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.

You can start right now, in the early phases of this year’s planning process, to create a list of key team players and their roles. And you don’t even have to guess, because we’ve provided you with detailed descriptions in the Dream Team Series on our Blog.

Next, you can make sure you’ve got all the key resources in one place, to make it easy on yourself this year and also make it easy on the next crop of volunteers next year. We’ve also got you covered on this – read about it here at our blog.

Finally, be sure to connect with our SchoolAuction.net community on Facebook,where you can pose questions and get access to support and resources from others who have been in your shoes.

The early bird gets the worm… er, the biggest share of the fundraising dollars.

Stay tuned for more timely tips,

Delila and the SchoolAuction.net team