EP 47: End-of-Year Data Superlatives

Jeff: Welcome back to the Elevate Your Event Podcast, where we talk about all the various ways you can make your next fundraising event better. This is a special one — we're going to do some end-of-year superlatives. Some best-ofs. We're going to get nerdy, which is fun. I'd like to introduce Lori Makkai from Handbid, who has decided to shake things up and sit in the host seat today. Wherever she wants to sit, that's where she gets to sit.

Lori: Shaking things up — think different, do different.

Jeff: And also in the studio with us is Elise Druckenmiller. We are ready to roll. A quick note on timing — we won't normally tell you when episodes are published, but we're going to spill the beans: this is a toward-the-end-of-year episode, recorded just before Christmas in Colorado, where we currently have sixty-five to seventy degree weather and are expecting eight inches of snow tomorrow. Welcome to Colorado.

Elise: It's not that cold! We're going to get a lot of snow tomorrow though.

Jeff: We're not going to talk about the weather — it depresses us and you don't want to hear that. We're going to talk about fun, nerdy stuff: top items, top bids, and interesting data from the Handbid database. Thanks to Carrie, our database guru, for pulling all of this data. We've got all-time records as well as top 2023 stats. Let's start with: all-time most bids on a single item. How many bids do you think it is?

Elise: Thirty-eight.

Jeff: The answer is 314. Now, we filtered for silent auction items specifically — excluding for-sale items and donation items. 314 bids on a twenty-yard dumpster haul and disposal.

Lori: Wow. People really wanted that.

Jeff: Top three on all-time most bids per item. Number two: 292 bids on a five-hundred-dollar gift card. Maybe they started bidding at a dollar with dollar increments. And that brings up the importance of bid increments — small increments definitely generate competition.

Lori: They had a lot of competition on that five-hundred-dollar card.

Jeff: Number three: a signed Donald Trump hat. 273 bids. Apparently it was a state convention of some kind. Anyway, for this year, the top bids per item was 249 bids on a NASCAR experience item — clearly a lot of NASCAR fans. Number two was a vacation for two to Tony's Fiji resort at 160 bids. And number three — and note that most of the rest of this list is from a commercial client — a Dyson Airwrap Complete Long. Elise, do what that is?

Elise: It's not a vacuum — it's a vacuum for your hair. It curls heatlessly, and if you swap the attachment it goes the other way. The 'Long' part is for long hair.

Jeff: Very cool. Okay — bids in an auction. All-time. Give me a rough guess on the total number of bids ever placed in a single Handbid auction.

Elise: Eleven thousand.

Jeff: Higher.

Elise: Eleven thousand five hundred.

Lori: Fourteen thousand.

Jeff: We had to get there eventually. 14,736 bids — in an auction for Disney memorabilia. Disney fans are relentless. Number two was 13,000, then 9,253, 8,375, and several more in the 8,000 range. Interesting note: the auction with 14,736 bids had 660 items. So it's not in the top twenty for item count, but it drove incredible bid volume. This year, number one was 7,214 bids in one auction. One that just recently closed — Trees of Hope — came in at 6,841. Congratulations, Trees of Hope.

Jeff: What drives high bid counts? Looking at the patterns we've seen, it's usually smaller bid increments. For charities specifically, if you have an item worth five hundred dollars, don't start it at four hundred. Start it around one hundred or one hundred fifty with a ten-dollar bid increment. Give your bidders enough time to bid. Once they've bid several times, they get emotionally engaged and attached to winning — it's no longer about what they're spending, it's about the win. You tend to see incredible bid counts and strong revenue. It's the same psychology Vegas uses. 'What's another five dollars?' That mentality works.

Lori: I'm at the tables where people are handing me money to roll the dice. But yes — it really does work.

Jeff: Auctions with the most items — silent items specifically, not tickets or for-sale items. What's the all-time record?

Elise: Thirteen hundred.

Jeff: Higher.

Lori: Five thousand.

Jeff: 2,084 items — and yes, it was a commercial client. The next one was also commercial at 1,304, and they basically auctioned off all the old street signs from their town when they redesigned the streetscape. Kind of neat — like license plates from places you grew up. We also had a youth hockey foundation do 1,270 items. And then we have a charity that runs their auction every year with roughly a thousand to eleven hundred items — they're consistently in that range. This year outside of that recurring client, we had a West Texas client who always runs a big January auction at 598 items. Handbags of Hope did 433, a Cayman Islands auction did 389. People are packing their auctions.

Lori: Handbags for Hope sounds wonderful. I'll take golf clubs for hope.

Jeff: And just to note: more items doesn't always mean more total bids. One client this year averaged 31 bids per item across their entire auction — that was Trees of Hope again, with nearly 6,200 total bids on 700 registered bidders. That's a high average. Now — most money charged to a single credit card transaction in a Handbid event. All time.

Lori: Two hundred ten thousand.

Jeff: Not even close. You're too low.

Lori: Wait — I actually know this one. Photographic memory is not cheating. It's two hundred and one thousand dollars.

Jeff: Two hundred one thousand dollars. On an Amex. Visa would have flagged that transaction immediately. I was actually nearby when that transaction processed and we were all wondering if it was going to go through. It did. I've seen some big ones — we had a transaction I know of where someone said 'run it' on a five hundred five thousand dollar item and I offered to just send them an invoice instead. He said, 'Oh, that'd be way better, but try the card first.' Those are the stories you remember.

Jeff: Let's talk devices. We have four categories where bids are placed in Handbid: iPhone app, Android app, web, and iPad kiosk app. What has the most bids of all time?

Elise: The web.

Jeff: For a lot of our competitors where that's the only interface, you'd be right — but not for us. It's iPhone.

Elise: Okay, I knew it was iPhone, I was just trying to be clever.

Jeff: iPhone accounts for 65 percent of all bids placed in Handbid. All time. Number two?

Elise: Web.

Jeff: Correct — 22 percent. Android was 11 percent, iPad 2 percent. In 2023 specifically, iPhone stayed at roughly 65 percent, but Android actually edged past the web slightly — around 18 percent — while web dropped a bit and iPad remained at 2 percent. iPad bidding is essentially a thing of the past.

Jeff: Why such a high iPhone skew? It's not that iPhone users bid more per se — it's that events skew heavily iPhone. In the general US market, iPhone and Android are maybe 55/45. At charity events, it's closer to 85 to 90 percent iPhone. So naturally the bid volume follows. But there's another layer: app users bid significantly more than web users.

Elise: My bidders won't use an app.

Jeff: Don't say that to me anymore. Let's actually look at real data from Trees of Hope, which just closed. Ready?

Jeff: Okay — Trees of Hope had 265 active iPhone bidders, 60 Android bidders, and about 98 web bidders once we factor in unknowns. Here's the bids per device: iPhone averaged 18 bids per bidder. Android averaged 15 bids per bidder. Web averaged 5.4 bids per bidder. So app users bid roughly three times as much as web users.

Elise: That's dramatic.

Jeff: Let's also look at a commercial client we've been working with for about a year — one with about a thousand bids and 225 bidders. This one is more balanced between iPhone and Android, which makes sense because commercial buyers are more diverse. iPhone and Android each average about six bids per bidder on the app, while web averages three. Still double the bid activity on app versus web.

Lori: I hate using websites on my phone — I want something formatted for a mobile screen.

Jeff: Exactly. And it's not just formatting — it's engagement. If you have software with proper reporting, you can see all of this for your own events: device breakdown, when bids came in, bid activity patterns throughout the auction. Don't just run an event, collect the money, and close the door. Look at your data. When did you get the most bid activity? Are you getting engagement before the event opens on-site? What does bid behavior look like around when you set the countdown timer? All of that is in your reporting. We should do a future episode on the psychology of why app users bid more than web users — we understand it and can explain the technology behind it too.

Jeff: Okay, this was really fun. End-of-year nerdy stats. Thank you both for joining me. Thank you, Elise, for guessing so enthusiastically. Takeaways for 2024: get that Fiji trip into your auction, watch your bid increments, and look at your device data. If you have questions about any of this — apps versus web, bidding psychology, anything we covered — reach out. Leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, or YouTube. Until next time, happy fundraising and happy New Year.