You’re hyper-focused on the impact your nonprofit can have on your community. Raising money to make a difference is prioritized over increasing the salaries of your top-level leadership. Creating a stellar guest experience is prioritized over hosting simple, straightforward events that are easy for your team to bring to life.

Such is the life of a nonprofit fundraising professional! There’s nothing wrong with putting in the work to go the extra mile.

But the truth is, it’s impossible to provide a great auction guest experience if your team’s back-end planning doesn’t go smoothly. 

In this quick guide, we’re going to cover four tips to help your team stay organized when planning your next charity auction:

1. Invest in the right auction technology.
2. Assign teams to tackle specific tasks.
3. Set parameters around item procurement.

Planning an auction can seem more stressful than other fundraising events, because there are many moving parts (we’re looking at you, item procurement). But, when has your nonprofit ever been one to back away from a challenge? Never!

With these tips, you can make the auction planning process a breeze. Let’s get started!

1. Invest in the right auction technology.

You’ve probably heard the phrase “work smarter, not harder” before. Maybe you’ve batched similar tasks to focus on one thing at a time, automated email outreach, or duplicated a past annual report PDF template to avoid fully reinventing the wheel.

It’s time to add “purchased auction fundraising software” to the list.

Charity auction software can significantly improve your guests’ experiences with the ability to browse, bid on, and purchase items using the tiny computers in their back pockets. This improved bidder experience is often what draws nonprofits to this type of software to begin with!

But did you know that software can drastically streamline the auction planning process, too? It’s the multi-tool of your auction, allowing you to group a ton of tasks under one umbrella. This includes:

• Getting rid of pesky, ineffective bid sheets once and for all. You can also automate bid increments and prevent guests from canceling their bids.
• Managing checkout, allowing guests to pay for their phones. Say goodbye to cash registers and a long line at your event!
• Live streaming auctioneers and entertainment for virtual events.
• Issuing tickets and checking in guests at the start of the event.
• Engaging guests and fighting digital fatigue throughout the event. This is done with tools like push notifications, fundraising thermometers, and more.
• Reporting on the event’s success after the fact.

Beyond investing in auction software, think of ways that you can use automation to your advantage both during planning and after the event. For example, you could automate email campaigns to avoid hitting send on each and every email. Your wrists will thank you!

Or, you could invest in supplementary fundraising automation tools like matching gift software. Quid pro quo donations—or any amount that guests pay over the fair market value of something at your event—could be match-eligible if the guest works for a company with a matching gift program. Matching gift software would help you find these opportunities.

2. Assign teams to tackle specific tasks.

Here’s another productivity tip you may have heard before: “Divide and conquer.” Or, maybe you prefer the more upbeat variation: “teamwork makes the dream work.” Regardless of which is your cup of tea, the lesson is the same: splitting your auction tasks up across multiple teams is key to successful planning.

Appoint specific team members (or a group, in the case of item procurement) to each of the following roles:

• Auction Chair: This team member is responsible for coordinating all communication between teams.
• Catering Manager: The catering manager is responsible for coordinating all things food-related at the event. This could mean hiring, communicating with, and paying a catering team for a live event or purchasing and shipping food to virtual event guests.
• Venue/Logistics Manager: Your venue and logistics manager coordinates all things related to the venue, from choosing a space, to decorating the space, to cleaning up after the fact. For a virtual event, this team member could focus on more general logistical considerations like making sure all presenters who are livestreaming are set up for success.
• Volunteer Manager: This team member recruits volunteers, trains them, and communicates with them during the event. After the event, your volunteer manager makes sure every volunteer is thanked for their help!
• Marketing Manager: Your marketing manager creates a strategy for spreading the word about the event. This could involve email, direct mail, video, social media, and more. Make sure whoever you appoint as your marketing manager is good at juggling multiple communication outlets at once.
• Item Procurement Team: You’ll want multiple people whose sole focus is procuring items for your auction. Your auction’s success depends on this team, so we’ll discuss their role in more detail in the next section.

Now, if you’ve ever done a school project where one or two individuals didn’t quite pull their own weight, you know that it takes more than just assigning tasks to get the job done. Build in a few safeguards to help your auction team stay on track, like holding a few (productive!) meetings throughout the process, maintaining an overall planning calendar, and setting benchmarks to make sure everyone’s hitting their goals.

3. Set parameters around item procurement.

When it comes to item procurement, you’re asking a sizeable group of people to go out into the world and draw on their personal connections to procure donated items. This leaves a ton of room for variation!

Think of it this way—do you have the same style and interests as your colleagues? There may be some crossover, but at the end of the day, you’re entirely unique individuals. So, if given the vague task of finding any item to auction off, you’re going to go after different things.

While variation isn’t necessarily bad, you should set some parameters to ensure all items procured will align well with your audience’s interests and budgets. Some items, while well-intentioned, may not be the best fit for your event!

Consider the following ideas to clarify parameters for your auction team:

• Share a list of potential items that you’d like to procure for the event. Handbid’s list of auction items offers over 40 ideas to help your team begin brainstorming.
• Consider assigning specific team members with procuring certain types of items. You may have a few general categories that you’d like to procure items within, such as travel experiences, antiques, local items, or bundles. Consider giving each team member a specific category to focus on, which ensures that you won’t have all of your team attempting to procure the same one or two items.
• Set “quality standards” around items. The most successful auction items are both hard for guests to get themselves (i.e. Super Bowl tickets rather than standard regular season tickets) and aligned with your audience’s unique interests. 

Check-in with this team regularly throughout the auction planning process, whether that means hosting bi-weekly meetings to update one another on your progress or having a running chat thread (a-la-Slack) and sending updates each time an item is acquired. This allows your item procurement team to have a full picture of which items have been procured so far, which ones still need to be secured, and how they can assist one another throughout the process.

Lastly, aim to organize auction items as they come in rather than scrambling to create order the day before the event. This includes assigning items with categories and unique identifiers (like an item number), defining the fair market value, writing item descriptions, and brainstorming how you’re going to display each item. For a virtual event, this is also when you’d take photos of the item. After all, do you want to spend the day before your auction taking and uploading photos of all 30+ items? Probably not!

When you first start planning a charity auction, you might feel a little overwhelmed— there are a ton of factors to keep in mind!


However, don’t let that stop you from holding an engaging fundraiser. With these three tips, you’ll be able to plan an auction and keep the process organized from start to finish. Good luck!

About the Author

Jeff Porter

Jeff Porter, Founder & CEO of Handbid, has spent 18 years in the nonprofit industry. In 2004 he founded the Prader-Willi Syndrome Association of Colorado where he still resides as board chair. Jeff learned early on that nonprofits desperately needed better and more affordable fundraising solutions. 

Leveraging his software background, he built most of the tools his charities used, and in 2011 he launched Handbid at his own fundraising event.  The goal was to improve the guest experience, reduce administration and increase revenue.  Handbid accomplished all of those goals, effectively doubling revenue in its debut. Nine years later, Handbid's suite of tools has delighted over a half-million guests, generated millions of bids, and helped thousands of charities raise well over $100 million.