In Part 1 of our discussion on how to ensure your auction can include entire school community, we talked about ticket pricing strategies. That’s half the battle, but you also need to ensure that the lineup of items you have available for sale is wide-ranging enough to include all budgets. The most common approach to dealing with this challenge is to increase the amount of items in your silent auction, and make sure that some of them have low starting bids. But this can quickly lead to silent auctions that have too many items. It can also backfire – anytime an item is available for competitive bidding, prices can get high quickly (that’s one of the reasons we love auction fundraisers, right?). I don’t really like the idea of watering down the effectiveness of the silent auction. Instead, consider adding the following to your event:
Each of these suggestions involves fixed-price items, ones where the buyer is not at the mercy of the rest of the room to not take the bidding above a level they feel comfortable at. They also preserve the fundraising power of those parts of the event that count on competitive bidding – the live and silent auctions. Spend time building a diverse mix of fundraising opportunities at your gala event, and you’ll be able to accommodate a diverse crowd.