EP 01: The Handbid Story: Why We're Freakin' Awesome at Doing Events

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.

Diana: Well, welcome to the first episode of the Elevate Your Event podcast! That's exciting. We're thrilled, energized, ready to go. We're going to spend a little bit of time today introducing ourselves and talking about what you can expect from the podcast. So let's just jump right in. This is Jeff. Jeff, you are the CEO and founder of Handbid, which is what this podcast is powered by. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Jeff: Sure. I've been in the fundraising charity space for probably about 15 years. But my entire career has been mostly in what I would call technical product development -- software development background, engineering background -- and then that's where Handbid came from.

Diana: Yeah, and we're going to get into Handbid and all of that. But let's get to know you first. You have a story behind why Handbid was started, and that also gave you a lot of experience in events as well.

Jeff: It did. So my wife and I, Carrie, we have four kids. Our first one was born in 2000. Our second child, Abby, was born in 2002, and it was not a typical birth. When she was born, there was clearly something wrong, and we weren't sure what. So we spent a week trying to figure that out with a variety of doctors. She ended up at Children's Hospital in Denver, and from there we got a genetic diagnosis of Prader-Willi syndrome. Nobody's ever heard of Prader-Willi syndrome unless you know somebody who has a kid with Prader-Willi syndrome. So for us, we didn't know anybody who had it, and we had to do a lot of research at the time. Through that process, we connected with other families who were impacted by Prader-Willi syndrome. We had a lot of thoughts around research and family support, but all of those require funds. And so when you need to go out there and raise funds for a charity, we didn't know what to do. We were like, "Okay, what do you do when you need to raise funds for a charity?" And we thought, "I think we just need to host a fundraiser."

So we had an annual Kentucky Derby party that we ran every year. Pretty popular event -- it was at our house. We actually converted that in 2005 into a fundraiser. Interesting, because a whole bunch of people that used to come to that event who weren't really interested in it being a fundraiser left, but a whole new set of people came in as well. So that first year we had an auction. My wife had some experience with charity auctions because she was running the school auctions for our son's preschool, and we had been to a couple of the elementary school auctions at the school our kids attended. So we had some experience with how those should work. We had a couple of other things that we did -- some drawings and whatnot. And I think the first year we raised $7,000.

Now, we were also fortunate in a certain way. Clint Hurdle, he was the manager of the Rockies at the time, and his daughter actually also had Prader-Willi syndrome.

Diana: Oh, wow.

Jeff: Yeah, and she was born a week after Abby. That was completely bizarre, because it's such a rare disorder. Just to have two kids in the state born a week apart is definitely not typical. So Clint was super generous. And of course the Rockies were super generous as well. That helped in terms of getting enough auction items and some support around that. So that event continued to grow over the years, and we continued to improve it in a variety of ways.

But at some point -- I don't remember exactly when -- we had about 250 to 300 people coming to our house, and I think our neighbors were ready to kill us. So we needed to move it to a real venue. We moved it to a place over at D.U. called the Cable Center. We ran our event there, did that for a few years, and it got bigger. Then we moved it to a different venue in the park, and it continued to grow.

Over this period of time, we just noticed that the guest experience was getting worse and worse. We didn't have any formal event fundraising experience, but you learn just by doing. We ran into a variety of issues, and we would go tackle those issues. At the same time, in 2009, I'd started up a software development company that was building apps for media companies. Mobile was kind of the new thing, and I personally knew that mobile was disrupting a variety of industries. I saw how it could be a game changer with fundraising as well.

So it was 2010, and I was talking to my wife, and I said, "I really do think we need to figure out how to move our event somehow onto mobile devices -- whether it's ticketing and check-in, or auctions, or whatever." And of course she was like, "No, let's just kind of stick with what we're doing."

Well, in 2010, the Derby event was over. We were still at the Cable Center. And I look over there at the end of the event, and there's this really long line wrapped around the entrance to the venue where people were checking out. At the head of that line was my wife, shuffling papers and walking around frantically trying to figure out what's going on. I'm thinking to myself, "I don't know if I should go over there or not. I could probably stay out of this and that'd probably be a good idea." But I went over and said, "Hey, what's going on?" And she said, "It's a total disaster. I'll tell you later."

So I look over and she's manually constructing invoices off of bid sheets. Obviously a bit of a mess. What had happened was she had built a tool -- because she was a software developer as well -- a little tool where you could enter in an item number and a bidder number and the amount they won it for. So you could say bidder 106, item 201, for $2,000. But people were reading numbers off the bottom of the first bid sheet incorrectly, maybe there were two or three pages, and it was a mess all around.

So I told her, "Hey, don't worry about it. We're going to automate this thing next year. We're going to build an app where people can bid from their phones, and we're going to generate the invoices electronically." And of course she at this point was like, "I don't want to talk about it."

But about a month or two after the event was over, I think she was ready to talk about it. "Okay, we've got to do something better than what we just did."

Diana: I got to say, there's so many events -- and I've been involved in the event industry too -- there's so many times when you say, "It's a disaster, I'll tell you about it later," and then you just have that trauma that you just can't talk about for a certain amount of time after. I have plenty of events like that.

Jeff: Yeah. Well, we get two types of people at Handbid that call us. One of them will be the person who calls us on Sunday morning saying "we need to talk" because their event was a mess the night before. And then there's the people who call about two or three months later and say, "Okay, I went on vacation, I went through some therapy, and now I'm ready to talk about how I can fix this for next year."

Diana: With your therapy. Therapy is pretty common for anyone in the events industry. And there's a variety of ways to do therapy, trust me. We won't get into all of those right now.

Jeff: But for us, we're the type of group here at PWSA that is not afraid to try to implement technology. I don't think I had her fully convinced that we should automate this entire thing, but I had her definitely convinced that we needed to make some form of a change.

So with the software development company I'm running, we have a group of really talented developers. We had a little bit of downtime, and so I gave them some instructions -- "Hey, I want you to build an app where people can bid in this auction." And of course the first question coming back from these millennials was, "What's a silent auction? I don't know what that is." I was like, okay, so let's explain how this all works. And so they started building this app.

We got enough to a prototype stage. I showed it to my business partner, and he was like, "This is really cool." I said, "Yeah, but we've got a couple other projects we need to dive into, so we'll just table this for now, and I'll figure out exactly whether or not this is the solution we really want to bring to market at our next event."

So January of 2011 rolls around. My business partner says to me, "Hey, what'd you do with that bidding app?" I said, "Well, it kind of mostly works but it's not really done." He said, "Well, can you have it done by May?" I said, "Why?" He goes, "Because I sold it."

Diana: Okay.

Jeff: I don't mind experimenting on my own friends and my own donors, so that's where we're going to start.

Diana: Okay. So you ended up getting to test it out first.

Jeff: Yes. Our event was three weeks before that one. So not only could we test it out, we could test it out and then obviously address any problems that we ran into.

So we finished it. And I remember Easter of -- so that would be roughly April of 2011 -- we had the entire family over. I had the software developer over who was mostly building this app, and they're all bidding on it and he's fixing bugs and bidding issues on the fly and we're kind of putting this all together. And then I remember my mother-in-law standing up at the end of the table and announcing that I was going to absolutely ruin this charity and ruin this event if we launched this stuff -- because we were about two weeks out from the event. I was like, "Okay, opposition to a new idea." And that's not uncommon in the charity space. So we're just going to go ahead and work right through that.

We kept working on it. And then my developer moved into our house for about two weeks and finished it.

Diana: Wow.

Jeff: And so the night before the event -- I can reveal all this now because this is 10 years ago and our software is way better -- but the night of the event we're still working out issues. For the most part it works. We have an iPhone app, we have an iPad app, and then we have our back-end solution. We never got the Android app done. Keep in mind that back then, about 17 to 18 percent of the people walking into that event had a smartphone -- that was basically the penetration of smartphones at the time. So we knew the iPad was going to be pretty critical, like an electronic bidding kiosk. We knew most of the people would be bidding off of that versus downloading our iPhone app and going around bidding from their phone, which we ultimately felt was where everything would end up eventually in the space.

So we're trying to get it done, it's like one or two in the morning and it's still not fully working but it's pretty close. I told my developer, "Go to bed, we don't have to be there until 3 o'clock tomorrow." This was before Slack -- it was all Skype. So I get on Skype and there's Taylor, and he's online. He stayed up all night and he said, "I got it working. I'll meet you at the venue at 2 o'clock." I said, "Okay."

So we had a whole bunch of people that came in from the Academy -- these were Air Force Academy cadets volunteering to be bid helpers and anything else we asked them to do at the event. About 10 or 12 of them. They roll in. We assembled all these iPads from board members. We had about 10 or 12 iPads stacked up, and we're logging into them and putting people's passcodes on the back because they lock and that kind of stuff. We're getting everybody's passcodes and getting all the iPads set up, downloading the app. And here's Taylor giving them an entire demo of how this thing works and a little training session. He's like, "Okay, so you're going to log into the iPad and then it's going to crash. But that's okay. Just open it up again, it'll work."

Diana: Okay.

Jeff: So it did. And I'll kind of jump ahead. We doubled our auction revenue at this event. Checkout, which the year before was the complete disaster -- but still, on a typical paper auction where you have 150 to 160 items, checkout takes 30, 40, 50 minutes. Checkout took 10 minutes. The auction closed, the invoices were correctly generated, people walked up to us. They didn't feel like they had to constantly get up from their chair and walk over to their bid sheets.

You lose out on -- and I think in a good way -- some of the tension that happens around those classic silent auction areas where people guard bid sheets and stand in front of them or intimidate you. Or the classic, which you won't believe is true, that I've seen -- people steal them. They hide them. Literally, at our event, there was a popular item and then the bid sheet was missing and miraculously reappeared with a minute left before the event was over. All that stuff kind of goes away. Human error, too -- is that a one, is that a seven? I can't tell. You can't read people's handwriting. So that part was super nice.

But just the fact that we had an event -- it was a Derby event -- people want to watch a horse race. They want to go outside with their kids. In the past, you lose out on networking or having a meaningful conversation because you've always got one eye on that auction item, wondering if you're winning. Having that capability actually allows you to stay connected to the event and to the people that you're with.

The aftermath that was interesting was there was a little resistance. Despite the fact that we doubled our auction revenue and literally turned checkout from an hour into 10 minutes, you still got to deal with people. And so here it comes from our board members. "Well, so-and-so didn't like it. They felt like it wasn't as fun because they're the bid sheet people." They wanted to stand in front of the bid sheets, or they got outbid at the last minute and they didn't like that. So we had a good conversation as a board, but it was a frank one where it became clear: they're actually going to stick with this, so I might as well get on board.

And for all the events I've gone to -- hundreds upon hundreds of events over the 10 years at Handbid -- you still see those people. You'll walk around the bidding area and this guy will be like, "This is the worst experience I ever had. I hate technology. This is no fun." You can't be dissuaded by those types of people. You kind of just have to let their process go through -- they tend to come around eventually. And so our bidders did as well.

That was the inaugural Handbid event. For our Kentucky Derby fundraiser, which is now morphing into a different fundraiser this fall, we've been doing it for 14, 15 years. It's crazy that it's been that long.

Diana: And you talk about this on the website -- the story of Handbid, just how much the revenue from the auction grew by going mobile. Can you talk a little bit about the events that you've seen and how they've grown just by eliminating some of the things that you just talked about?

Jeff: Yeah, because we had to put together a thesis that we had to take in front of our board. We're not autonomous -- Jeff Porter doesn't get to decide what PWSA does. We had to have a conversation about it. We just luckily have a board that's willing to try things.

So we went in front of them and said, "We have a couple of things we want to prove. One, that people will use this technology -- and I'm not talking about just young people. Anybody walking into this event can use it. People in their 70s, people in their 60s, people in their 20s or 30s." The other thing is that we wanted to prove that if we allow people to stay connected to the auction, they will in turn stay engaged and continue to bid. And then the third thing we wanted to prove is that if we change certain elements about how the auction works -- like extending the amount of time the auction is open, or changing the level of the bid increments -- we can drive higher revenue.

So how do you think about it? In your classic paper auction gala, say registration's at six, people walk in the door, you've got the auction area open, maybe people float in through 7 o'clock. You give them 30 minutes or so to bid, and then you're dinging the glasses. Everybody's in the ballroom at 7:30, 7:45. You've got a presentation, you've got a live auction. A lot of people have left the silent auction. It's outside, not in the ballroom. They're listening to your presentation. You close everything. Sometimes auctioneers like to have the silent auction close first because they don't want people distracted by it while they're up on stage. So maybe you close your silent auction at 8:30 when the live auctioneer comes on stage. How much time have you given people to bid in your auction? Maybe an hour.

Diana: Right.

Jeff: So for us, we said what we're going to do is open our auction early, and we're going to encourage our clients to do the same. If your event's Saturday night, open your auction on Monday. Get people connected to it, get them bidding throughout the week. Now when they walk in the door, they're not trying to figure out what to do -- they're already connected to everything. So that was one element of it.

The other one -- and not specifically at our first event, because we were still writing code at 3 o'clock in the morning -- but in all the ones we did after that, that was absolutely the case that we pushed.

The other thing is, if you think about how bidding works in a paper bid auction, you're not going to put low bid increments in place. People had a transitional struggle with this -- a mindset struggle. They'd think, "I'm going to go from paper bidding to mobile bidding, but I'm not really going to change how I structure my auction. I have my rules of thumb and I'm going to stick with them." And that's not always ideal.

What people would do in a paper auction is say, "Okay, the item's worth a thousand dollars. I'm going to start the bidding at 400 or 300 and I'm going to put a hundred dollar bid increment on it." Well, the problem is, if I come to that item and I look at it and say, "Okay, $300, I'll bid on that" -- well, now the next bid's $400. Do I really want to go up to $400? I'm not really ready to do that yet. So what you see is you don't see a lot of bidding happening.

What you have to do to get people past the point of "what does it cost" to "I want to win" and to make it more of a competition is give them a lower entry point. So we were pushing people to lower their starting bids and also significantly lower their bid increments.

You don't do that on paper because you're in a ballroom -- you're not going to get up from your table and walk out the door to up your bid by five bucks. It's just not worth it. Well, on a phone, you can do that in two seconds. So by lowering the bid increments, we actually saw more bidding happening. And then once somebody's been outbid three or four or five times, what you start to observe is it's not about how much money they're spending anymore -- you hear that complaint at the end when they check out.

But we track bids per active bidder -- that's what we call it. We want to see how much your bidders are bidding. You can track bids per item and all that other stuff. That's interesting, but really for us, it's about how engaged your donors or your bidders are in your auction, because that gives us a strong signal of how well you're likely to do. And if you give them enough time to bid and you make these other changes, you tend to see significant revenue increases, and we've seen it. So obviously at our event, we doubled. Not everybody's going to double their auction revenue, but we have seen people with 50% increases, 75% increases. I've seen people more than double their auction revenue. It really depends on what kind of changes you've made from what you were doing before to what you're doing now.

Diana: Right. So let's get into the Elevate Your Event podcast. What can people expect from us on a weekly basis?

Jeff: We've seen people do an amazing job of putting together an awesome event, and then we've seen things that we would say are not so good. And in that spectrum of amazing events to events that have problems or maybe aren't that organized, there are other things that we want to share with you around how you manage an event, how you manage your problems. I have never been to an event that had zero problems. But you learn how you're going to deal with certain things -- what's important, what's not.

We're going to talk about some of the things we've seen around how to streamline your event, how to make the guest experience better, some of the things that we would not recommend, and some of the things we'd love for you to do, including being a little bit more flexible -- maybe letting go of some of the traditions you've held because the way things work today is a little bit different.

So we have a lot to share. Event fundraising, the types of fundraisers we've seen that work, how to run a better golf tournament, how to run a better gala, why events are still important. A lot of charities feel like events are the starting point, but then from there they're going to evolve into maybe major gifts and donor development. To me, those aren't mutually exclusive. You have to be able to do both of those over time, but you don't want to get rid of some of the things that events give you, which are a great entry point for growing your donor base. So we're going to talk about those things as well.

We're going to bring on some pretty cool guests -- people who have been in the event space for a long time. They're going to share some of their experiences and best practices as well.

Diana: Well, you've touched on a lot of things just in this short conversation that I think event planners and executive directors and those event teams always have on their mind. Guests and donors or board members who are resistant to change, the timing of your event, how your event is set up, how to keep your guests engaged, things like that. I think those are all things that we'll be talking about. And you've built a fantastic team at Handbid. We talked about what it looked like in 2010, 2011, and now you have a team of 20 people working for Handbid, somewhere around there. And they're all event professionals and former fundraisers who have been in this space as well. So we're going to be bringing a lot of the team in to talk about best and worst events, maybe a horror story or two in there. We all have stories to share. And I think people in the event space, we all love to sit around and talk about, "Let me tell you what happened at my event in 2018." I think we all have those war wounds that we like to show off every now and then. So we'll be bringing some people in from the team. We'll be bringing some outside people in. What are you most excited about?

Jeff: I think our ability to share what's worked best for us and the ability to share that with the entire community, whether a Handbid client or not. Our goal and the reason why we started the company was to help charities raise more money, and we want to see people do that.

I think what's unique about us -- and there's a small group of us out there in this space -- is that we did come from this space and we do know how to run an event. Our software is built around that knowledge, because software typically automates a process, and it is our process and it's how we do things. We'll share some of that through here.

But at the same time, there are so many solutions out there. When you think about, "Hey, I'm going to go buy auction software, I'm going to go buy fundraising software" -- who built it? Do they really know, or do they have any experience running the type of event that you plan to run? Because I think that's going to be important when you think about what you're going to put into place. Your guests are going to use it, and there are other things you have to factor into that.

So while we're going to stick mostly on the event side of things, we're going to dive into the guest experience a lot. And that guest experience also includes the type of technology you're asking them to use, what that technology is going to do with their private information, and the importance of credit card security and data privacy and security and all that kind of stuff.

What we do at Handbid on Tuesdays is we talk about what happened at events over the weekend, especially for anybody on our staff that was involved with those events. We talk about what worked well and what didn't work well. Sometimes that can impact what we want to do with our software, but a lot of times it impacts what we want to be telling clients down the road and in the future. We'll talk about that also, because we do a lot less compromising today than we did 10 years ago.

When you're a small company and your clients are like, "I want to do it this way," you say, "Oh, okay, I wouldn't do it that way, but if that's what you want, we'll do it that way." And then it's a mess. Now we just don't do as much of that anymore. We say, "No, you're not going to do it that way," and then we explain to you why that's a bad idea. We continue to have these conversations with clients today, and we're going to go through those on this podcast also.

Diana: Well, I'm excited. I know that the team is excited. We've got some good things planned. Make sure you tune in every week to the Elevate Your Event podcast. You'll be able to find us on YouTube or anywhere that podcasts can be downloaded. Any parting thoughts?

Jeff: No, that sounds awesome. I can't wait for the next one. We're going to really dive in.

Diana: Sounds great.