EP 03: Silent Auction Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Jeff: Welcome to the Elevate Your Event podcast, where we talk about how to plan and execute an unforgettable event that will dazzle your guests and generate more income for your organization. From fundraising and securing trendy auction items to event production and logistics, get the best tips and advice from seasoned fundraising and event professionals who have been in your shoes.

Jeff: Welcome back to the Elevate Your Event podcast. We've got some special guests, Lori Mackay and Diana DuPont Shea from Handbid. Hello, hello. Very excited. I'm Jeff Porter, CEO of Handbid, and we are very excited to have you on the show with us today. What are we going to talk about today?

Diana: Oh, I love the subject. We already know what we're talking about because we're organized.

Jeff: Yes. Like a been-planning kind of thing. Silent auctions, auctions, everything auctions.

Lori: Items. Items. Items. Don't you say "Adams"?

Diana: Adams? Did I get that right? Adams.

Jeff: Like a South Carolina kind of thing. Certain people in South Carolina pronounce it "Adams."

Lori: Adams. Okay. I don't. They're items. Okay. But I call it silent auction items. So there, there's another curveball, Jeff.

Jeff: Okay, I love it. I love curveballs, especially when they're signed by a famous baseball player and put in an auction.

Diana: With the certificate of authenticity.

Jeff: Authentic, by the way. So we're going to talk about -- this came up the other day when we were chatting. We were like, okay, what are the things that you could do to make your auction better, and also what are the things that you could do to make it worse? And we got so excited in the conversation, it got a little heated, but it was all good stuff. We decided we were going to come on the show and share it with you guys today.

Jeff: So I can start. I can throw one out there. I think one of the things -- and this is going to sound fairly obvious coming from me -- but one of the things that could make your silent auction worse is to use paper bid sheets.

Lori: Yes.

Diana: People are mean with paper bid sheets. I mean, they are mean.

Lori: Yeah. They just bully people, stand over their bid sheet. Don't let people bid on something after them. They're kind of mean sometimes.

Jeff: It's called intimidation. It's a real thing.

Lori: It is a real thing. And what about pen stealers?

Diana: Pen stealers. Paper stealers. Oh, how about the bid sheet stealer?

Lori: Yes, the bid sheet stealer. And you don't think that happens. It happened at my own event, okay?

Diana: Oh, yeah, you saw it.

Lori: And it's like, how could there be sheets of bids on all these items, and here's this one item won by this one lady, and it has three bids on it. Something's odd. Interesting. Yeah, but that bid sheet was missing for most of the auction and then mysteriously reappeared right when things were closing.

Diana: Well, here's another one about paper bid sheets. Usually there's libation going on.

Jeff: I know. I should have done that -- like in your personal notepad. It's been a long time since I've been to a paper auction, if I'm really telling you. Imagine someone at the paper auction has got their iPhone out and typing down what they bid on. That's awesome.

Diana: But do you want to hear a funny intimidation story? So we're talking to this client and they were telling us, before they had started using mobile bidding, they did paper bid sheets. They were a baseball club, so this was at the baseball stadium. They had this bat, and here is this little old lady -- and you think she's totally harmless -- but she stood right next to the bid sheet, and people would come up and say, "Oh, that's a signed bat from this famous baseball player. I'm going to bid on it." And she'd say, "I'm bidding on this bat for my grandson." "Oh, okay. He really likes this player." "You don't want to take this present away from my grandson, do you?"

Jeff: Oh my God. She went for the jugular, man. She was not messing around. She was like Grandma of the Year. She was going to get the award.

Diana: That's right.

Jeff: Oh my gosh. So what happened? Do you remember?

Diana: Well, she was intimidating people out of bidding, and they're like, "How do we tell this nice old lady to take a hike? Go sit down." So they're like, "Oh, so nice with mobile bidding. People can bid from anywhere, and she can't really bother us."

Jeff: And then we did another -- someone stood in front of the bid sheets and put his arms out and said, "These are mine."

Lori: Wow. That's something.

Diana: Can we also talk about not combining paper bid sheets with mobile bidding software? It's really either/or.

Jeff: Yeah. Not if you want to give yourself a lot of work. And you really want to make your bidders mad. The whole point of mobile bidding software is to be all-inclusive and right there at the fingertips of the guest. It can get confusing if you try to do some sort of hybrid -- some of your items are paper bid sheets, some of them are mobile.

Diana: Especially when they can't figure out where to go to bid anyway.

Jeff: Totally agree with you. It's funny, we've seen that, and we've had to come in and put our foot down a little bit and say, "You're actually going to make this worse, not better." But getting back to worse and better, there's ways to measure that. It can be in how you frustrate your guests -- that would frustrate your guests for sure. It also could be in how much money you make. We talk about this a lot. If we stay on the concept of paper bid sheets, one of the things you can't do with paper bid sheets is pre-bidding.

Diana: Oh.

Jeff: And oh my God, I feel like -- we started doing auctions on mobile bidding back in 2011. So the 2011-12 time frame, the big thing that people saw as the advantage was pre-bidding. I remember there was one school in town, and we roll into their event on Friday night, and they are just absolutely thrilled. And I'm like, "Why are you guys already happy? It's great that you're already happy, but the event hasn't started yet." And they're like, "No, you don't understand. We made more money this week in pre-bidding than we did last year."

Diana: I love it. And why not, right? Because you've got people now -- not only are you starting to get more revenue out of it, what else are you doing? You're getting people comfortable with the software.

Jeff: Oh, totally comfortable. It works out all the kinks. I like to think of it as widening the window with which people can bid. If you have a paper bid auction, it's when the door is open and when you close the auction or when you pick up the paper bid sheets. But with pre-bidding, it can be whatever you decide. We usually see -- what do we see? Like a week is about average, maybe two weeks.

Diana: Five days.

Lori: Five days. Five days is pretty normal.

Jeff: So you're turning an auction from hours into days. And when you get people more time to bid, it actually does work. And the audience is increased. So you've gone from just the people that have the opportunity locally to come to your event and bid on your auction. Now you have grandma out in Illinois who can bid on an item for her grandson's school in Colorado.

Diana: Without standing next to the guy that's bidding on it, intimidating him, right?

Jeff: Yes, exactly.

Lori: Or I'm at a family wedding and I can't come anyway. I still want to participate. I still want to bid on that item. I can do it now. So bigger audience, more fun.

Jeff: So let's talk about another advantage of mobile bidding over paper bid sheets since we're on the topic. This one is not intuitive to most people. And it wasn't, I would even say, intuitive to my organization when we started with mobile bidding. But it makes sense now that we think about it. So picture this: someone's walking through the auction area, maybe using their iPhone to write down what they bid on. It's a brilliant idea, okay? And then they go in and eventually the glasses ding and they go sit at the seated, plated dinner in the ballroom -- separate room. And at that point, maybe they've been outbid, maybe they haven't, they don't know. That's one problem. But are they really going to get up out of their seat, walk out of the room, go back over to an item to increase their bid by five dollars? Probably not, right? That's a lot to ask. But to whip out my phone, look at it, and then increase my bid by five dollars -- easy.

Jeff: Okay, so what do people do with paper bid sheets? They increase the bid increments. So if you have an item worth a thousand dollars, and you start the bidding high at five hundred, you're probably going to put a hundred-dollar bid increment on it. And so what's going to happen is, I'm going to go there and say, "Oh, that thing's worth a thousand dollars." Although I do honestly believe people undervalue items more than they overvalue them.

Diana: Oh, yeah.

Jeff: Maybe that's worth eight hundred, nine hundred. I'll bid five hundred. Okay. Now you're asking the next person to bid six hundred. And that's a big ask. I may or may not be willing to spend six hundred. Usually if that's the start for me, I'll probably pass. If you had asked me to bid five-ten, five-fifteen, five-twenty on it -- yeah, I'll do that.

Jeff: And then what ends up happening after a couple of bids? The mentality shifts, right? We see this all the time. Everybody who comes up at checkout, they're like, "I can't believe I spent this much money on this item, but there was no way I was going to lose. I didn't want to be the loser."

Diana: Yes.

Jeff: And so it's true. It does work, right? Once you get someone bidding two, three, four, five times, all of a sudden it's not about what they're spending. It's about the competition that comes from the bidding back and forth and being outbid and wanting to ultimately win. It's a psychological component.

Diana: It is. Yeah.

Lori: And charities can take advantage of that. Right. And Diana and I both have special needs children. So we are experts in psychology. There's no doubt about it. We totally get all this.

Jeff: Yes. And it's interesting when we talk to folks who are coming from paper and we're talking to them about their auction. Like, "Hey, what can we do -- should we open our auction early?" Yes. The other thing that tends to help is starting your items lower and decreasing your bid increments.

Diana: Oh, well, then I'm not going to make as much money.

Jeff: No, in fact, actually, you're going to make more. And the reason you're going to make more is you're going to get more people bidding. Back in the day with paper, my wife was into the whole preschool and school auctions for our kids. They would track revenue per item. We track bids per active bidder. That's what we track. Because we can go into an auction, put the revenue aside, we can see bids per active bidder, and we can know how well that auction did.

Diana: What would you say is a good number of bids per bidder for an average event?

Jeff: I like ten or above, honestly. That would be awesome.

Diana: I was wondering if that shifted. I think in the last several years, when I talk to folks, I see seven bids per bidder. I call that a good auction. Ten is about great.

Jeff: Yeah. Ten bids per bidder. And if we go in and it's three, the first thing I do is go look at the bid increments. And they're nuts. We will literally go through and pull out all the items in a spreadsheet and calculate the bid increments, and we'll say, "Really? So you started this item at a hundred dollars and you put a fifty-dollar bid increment on it and it's worth three hundred -- you're going to get three bids, max. Probably one bid, right?" So that's the stuff we've seen in the past that just doesn't work.

Jeff: Think about it this way, right? One, when I'm on paper bid sheets, I'm asking somebody to get up out of their seat and physically burn some calories to bid. And two, my auctions are typically short. If I started at six and there's bid sheets out, and live auctioneers were probably still like this today, if you have paper bid sheets, they probably want your auction closed before the live auction starts because they don't want people leaving the room to go bid on stuff. So now you've got six to eight -- two hours. You're thinking yourself, "Oh my God, if I make my bid increments five dollars, no one's going to bid." Well, or they're not going to have enough time. Here's the beauty of it: one, you've been pre-bidding all week. And two, you don't have to close your silent auction before your live auction. In our experience, it's worth pushing back if your auctioneer tries to talk you into that.

Diana: We should repeat that. In our experience, it's worth pushing back if your auctioneer tries to talk you into closing your silent auction before the live. And it sounds like a podcast for later, Jeff.

Jeff: Exactly, it does. Just throwing it out there. So anyway, I do think that makes a big, big difference. Obviously then the question is, what do you guys tell your clients or the folks that you're coaching on where to set starting bids and bid increments?

Lori: I typically say whatever the fair market value is, around forty percent of that is your starting price, and then your bid increment would be roughly ten percent of your starting price.

Jeff: I like that. Yeah, that's exactly what I say. Obviously, you round a little bit. So ten percent of your starting bid price is seven dollars -- you don't have to be exact. Although computers are amazing, and mobile bidding will calculate it for you. People in their head are thinking of themselves, "Twenty-one?"

Jeff: Showing the value can be helpful. I know some people think, "Oh, I want to hide the value because they may think it's worth more." Those types of things are typically the unique experiences where everybody values them differently anyway, and you can just mark it as priceless if your software has the ability to do that.

Lori: So you can mark it as priceless, but again to that point, when I'm coaching people -- make sure you're not marking every item as priceless because then it loses its value. I had one auction where everything was priceless, priceless, priceless, priceless, and I'm like, really? Is it all priceless? I think I saw that on Amazon and it was worth two hundred fifty bucks. That wasn't priceless.

Jeff: So keep those for the really cool experiences -- things that you can't quantify with a dollar amount, something that is a unique experience. "Priceless" could be a famous meet-and-greet, backstage passes somewhere. Those are hard to value because for bands that I like, backstage passes would be worth a lot, but if it's a band I don't really care for, I don't know.

Jeff: So what happens with high bid increments on items like that? People bid once. Maybe.

Lori: Yeah.

Jeff: It's funny, we'll go into events and I'll be like, "Let's take these professional services and we're just going to assume they're worth half of what your donor said, and we're going to get these things low. We're going to put a low bid increment on here, and we're going to see what happens."

Diana: Yeah.

Jeff: I think professional services is one of those tricky areas.

Lori: I would agree. I had one that was legal fees for wills or something. Totally niche.

Diana: Niche. Niche.

Lori: Thanks. I'm here for you. But it's completely dependent on if there's one person at the event that wants to buy legal fees from a random lawyer that they don't know.

Jeff: Right.

Lori: So you have to remember those things. When working with clients, I'll typically talk to them about these items, and sometimes a personal trainer or somebody might donate ten sessions, which is really lovely. We don't want to limit that and we don't want to devalue that. You can mark that item with maybe a minimum bid or something, but you can start it at a lower price. Something along those lines where the trainer really wants five hundred dollars -- they feel like they really donated something of value for their time. You can honor them that way. But yeah, those professional services can be tricky.

Jeff: You want to hear the funniest one?

Diana: Oh my God, I do. Oh boy.

Jeff: We're at a school auction -- hold on, people -- and they've got no bids on this item. The guy's like, "Hey, look at our no-bids and explain to us what we could do to fix them." So one of the items was marriage counseling.

Diana: Yeah, who wants to bid on that?

Jeff: And I was like, "You might want to change the title." I think the guy's name was Charles. I'm like, "Charles, nobody here wants you to know that they need marriage counseling."

Diana: "Hi, I'm here to pick up my item: marriage counseling."

Jeff: That's right. "Hello. I got ten substance abuse sessions."

Diana: Checkout people are like, "There you go, Mr. Palsh." Yeah, you might want to look at that.

Jeff: Those are awesome. That's funny. Oh my gosh.

Diana: Yeah, you could just change the title on that one. Maybe. Or some of these things, maybe you put them in a raffle.

Jeff: Oh, there. That's a whole other podcast -- raffles.

Diana: Oh my God. I can't believe I used that word.

Jeff: I can't believe you did either. That is a banned word. Okay, anything else on bid sheets?

Lori: That was good.

Diana: Oh, and then any other minor stuff, like people can't read your handwriting, which is always the best. But that's kind of a thing of the past. I haven't seen them at an event in a really long time. Obviously I work in mobile bidding software, so if I walked into an event that had bid sheets, I would be like... But even in just my regular life and the fundraisers I go to, it's pretty rare to see. We talk to plenty of people that are coming from paper bid sheets, so they're still out there.

Jeff: You're going to see a lot more revenue when you get rid of them. Trust me. It is a big cost, and we used to say that -- the hidden costs, right? It's the bid increments and all that other kind of stuff. So let's talk about something different. Let's talk about the auction area itself.

Diana: Yes.

Jeff: Because we've been to so many of these things, and I think a lot of times people don't realize you've built a retail shop.

Lori: Yeah, right? It's merchandise.

Diana: Yep. So as we like to say, instead of it looking like a garage sale -- or as a good friend of mine used to say, a garage sale is just missing the B. If you add a B into the middle of that word, it's what it really is: a garbage sale.

Jeff: Right. So I was going with "barrage sale."

Diana: A barrage sale?

Jeff: A barrage sale. This is hilarious. I never heard that before. But it does need to be more like the Apple Store.

Lori: Yeah, right?

Jeff: And I think they kind of changed things. We're not here to just come and gush over Apple. But they did a nice job on the retail side because their stores are very bright and very clean. And when we say clean, there's not a lot of clutter, right?

Lori: So hide the storage boxes away for your items. Have a clean space. It's aesthetically pleasing. You look across and you go, "Oh, I want to browse. I want to walk around."

Diana: And can we talk about elevating the items if we're elevating our event? Let's talk about elevating the items. The items should be at all different levels. There should be lighting.

Jeff: What do you do?

Diana: I like to use the storage boxes for the item. Put a cover over top.

Jeff: Yeah. I mean, unless you're going for some sort of strange look.

Diana: With lights. I'm telling you, lights for sure. Everybody's like, "I'm going to make my event fancy," and kind of this nice, elegant gala, and then they flip the lights down and I can't read anything in there. Your auction area really benefits from being well lit. It doesn't have to be as bright as the Apple Store, but people need to be able to see this stuff.

Jeff: Yeah, right? Little spotlights. I went to one event and they just kind of built uprights and had spotlights pointing down. It looked really, really good.

Diana: Yeah, we've been to events where they have these gooseneck lights that are battery operated. It's nice because the light can get tilted in various ways depending on how you have everything set up. And Amazon -- oh my goodness, nowadays you can buy these little lights that are battery powered. You turn them on, they're all different colors. You can put them right next to the item. So nice.

Jeff: So lighting for sure. Okay. Maybe spacing them out a little bit.

Diana: Yes.

Jeff: Yeah. You've got to be a little careful depending on your auction. Obviously, if it's people that you know coming, it's one thing. But do be a little bit careful about what you put out, because we've been to auctions where people have taken that baseball card -- it's in a little sleeve -- and just stuck it in their pocket and walked out.

Diana: Or gift cards?

Jeff: Yes. Gift cards are best kept off the display table. We've seen that. One group had the gift card tree and they had them all on it. I'm like, "Ooh, yeah, take those off. Put the gift card covers on the gift card tree, not the actual gift card itself." The envelopes are perfect. They go on there. But that was a side topic on auction security, which can be a whole other podcast. Auction security.

Lori: How about the ability to walk all around the tables, and spacing of the tables? You think about how many people you have coming to your event and how much space there is. I went to one event -- it was so interesting -- everybody walked into the event and then they all turned right and got in line and followed each other through the silent auction area like a buffet.

Jeff: Like an IKEA, almost.

Lori: It was like IKEA, and I had never seen such a thing. "How do I get out of this maze? What's the shortcut?" I said, "Is the bar that way?" And why is everybody standing? They're like, "They're just going to look at the silent auction." Oh my gosh. Why are they all in line? They shouldn't have to wait in line to look at your silent auction. But you should be flattered if they're waiting in line to see your silent auction, congratulations. By the way, I was astounded. I was like, "Is the bar over there? What's going on?" It was so funny.

Jeff: That is awesome. We do this one event every year, and they kind of finally converted it to this IKEA maze, and then they set it up where you had to go through it. And it was funny. People walk in this tent and they're like, "Where do I go?" We're like, "That way." It just wound through.

Diana: It worked.

Jeff: It did work. Oh my God. It totally worked. That's right. You were there for the first time.

Diana: Yes, I was. One of my favorite events that I worked for silent auction, which I thought was completely unique, is we were in a museum. And they put the silent auction items all throughout the museum. So people were walking through and perusing the items. It was just so free-flowing and casual and cool.

Jeff: So it's kind of opposed to this formal room of silent auction, which I still like. Don't get me wrong. There are so many reasons. As long as the room's accessible. When the auction area is kind of out of the way of things, that's not always a good idea.

Diana: Right.

Jeff: Yeah, I actually hear more and more about that -- spreading the auction items throughout the whole venue. I'm starting to hear more of that. Kind of leaning that way.

Diana: Yeah. It's because events have moved a little bit away from, especially after COVID, from these real formal events into more casual environments -- even food trucks and things like that, a whole other topic. But having that same casual feeling for silent auction items is kind of a fun thing as well. Just make sure you have a good plan for checkout. Just think about that when you're moving items around.

Jeff: I love the fact that you've jumped right to that because you're like, "I know the problem."

Diana: Yes, the problem would occur if you don't think that through.

Jeff: Yeah, you got to think about it. You mean when all of your auction items are all over the place and you don't know where they are?

Diana: On three floors?

Jeff: Three floors. And the auction is closed. Now what?

Diana: Yes. Even though I like the items spread around, especially when you don't number your items in a way that tells you what floor they're on and you have to walk across three floors looking for one -- that's even better.

Jeff: No, what's great is you can put your Apple Watch on for your activity and then you can during checkout just run from floor to floor.

Diana: Thank you.

Jeff: Being creative is impactful, but when I go and look at an auction and I'm doing what might be considered an auction health check, and I look and every item is so obscure with the description and the item name that I don't know what it is -- I personally, and this is my opinion, like to look at an auction and see that some items are very direct, and then just a smattering of them make you curious. They're a little bit like clickbait. Like, "What is this item? I don't know what 'before and after' means." That might mean golf and lunch afterwards, right? But you don't want all of your items to be like that because that's making your donors burn a lot of calories to figure things out.

Lori: Tell them about one that you named one time. Y'all, I have to give Jeff this credit. This was so fun. So we go to this event, and it's filled with golfing and libation.

Diana: Again, with the libation.

Lori: So we happened to be consulting with the client, and we had all these items that we had to package, and one of them was a foursome and one of them was a giant bottle of vodka. And I was like, "Well, why don't we put this together as a package? What do we call it?" And silence. And then Jeff goes, "I got it." I was like, "Well, what is it?" And he said, "The only way to drink and drive."

Diana: That's cute. Isn't that a good one?

Jeff: One of my personal favorites that I came up with, yes. I'm patting myself on the back. When I was an auction manager for my daughter's elementary school, I think we had about 350 items, and when you package items you kind of get down to the stragglers and you're like, "What the heck do we do with these?" So I had two tickets to see The Wizard of Oz in Arlington, Virginia, and I had the Cheesecake Factory. They were pretty obscure. I didn't want to do those as stand-alones. And I might have had maybe four or five of these items. I don't remember what the other ones were. And I thought, well, I wonder if I can just do both of those together. And then it would be like I could sell it almost like a dinner out and then you go to your show. So I was like, "Okay, I'll do that." And I left my computer and went about my day. And then later, I was like, I know what I'm going to call this item. So remember, it's The Wizard of Oz and it's the Cheesecake Factory. So you all want to know what I called it?

Diana: Yes.

Jeff: Cheese Whiz.

Diana: Oh my gosh.

Jeff: Right? But I love it when you kind of play around with item names, especially with live auction items, because the auctioneer is going to talk about it anyway at the live auction. They're not going to bid on it on the phone or whatnot. They're going to see it, but they're not going to be able to do anything. So I love that for a live auction -- just be super fun and creative with live auction items. Because why not?

Lori: We'll dive into this in a future episode because there have been some hilarious items and we've named some of them. But sometimes I'll go through and I'll be like, "What the heck is that?" And I'll change it. When they're like, "Oh, do an auction health check, show us how we can make our event better," I'm like, "How about we just call this 'Dinner for Two at Ruth's Chris Steakhouse'?" Because somebody would be like, "Yes, right?" Versus whatever you called it that gives no idea what it is. Let's just cut to the chase.

Jeff: A steak through my heart. Exactly.

Diana: I think one thing we don't want to forget is, when working with software and you're writing down the name of an item, don't just assume that people know what it is -- to your point about the obscurity. I worked an event where they were like, "Gift card to the Cheesecake Factory." That's it. No dollar amount. No dollar amount. And so I was going in there at the event going, "What's the dollar amount? Let's put it in the description." Especially if you're doing a basket or anything like that and you have an online platform where people who aren't at the event might want to know what's in the basket -- just bullet point it out. Let them know what they're getting and what the total value is.

Lori: You bullet point that out in the description, and then any sort of fine print that anybody needs to know, it's worth adding that as well.

Jeff: I'm excited because now we know there's going to be a podcast topic we'll dive into at some point on that.

Diana: Yeah. I love that. That would be really nice.

Jeff: Well, I think we are running out of time. This has been absolutely fabulous. I feel like we could have kept going.

Diana: Oh my gosh. Yeah. There could be a part two to this.

Lori: There could be a part two. Maybe.

Jeff: This was fun. Let us know if there's any other questions you have about silent auctions, and we can certainly try to address those in a future podcast. Otherwise, thank you guys so much for coming and sharing your time with us today.

Diana: Thanks for inviting us. This was fun.

Jeff: Until we see you guys again, have a great event.