In part one of “How to Plan a Silent Auction Event” I told you the importance of making sure you convert PDF. I really can’t stress how important that is. One of the things I did was grab a Metro Parent magazine and email EVERY local advertiser to see if they would be interested in giving a donation to the auction. Had I not converted the files to a PDF, anyone of those locations could have edited my donation letter, if they wanted to (I doubt they would have, but they still could have). Not sure how to convert a file to a PDF? Check out this Free PDF trial!
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Besides making sure your files are in a PDF format, you also want to make sure that on the day of the auction, you don’t set out the actual gift cards businesses donated. Things get hectic at the end of an auction. No matter how much you plan and prepare, you will always have people coming to get their donations or trying to help hand out donations. That gets crazy. So instead, I created a nifty template that I could fill out for each donation and print on cardstock. Then, once the winner is determined AND they have paid, you hand them the actual gift card they won. Works out so much better in the end and you don’t have to worry about donations ending up missing.
Here’s what I created for the “fake” gift cards:
To go along with the “fake” gift cards, I also made sure that EACH donation that had a gift card had their own manila envelope labeled with the bid sheet number, what the actual donation was, and the retail value. This not only kept me organized, but it made it so much easier at the time of distribution after someone paid for their items, to make sure they got everything they were supposed to get.
Finally, it is important to know your location. Know exactly where you want your guests to sit and enjoy dinner, where your entertainment will take place, and where you want the actual auction items to be at. I recommend you have one spot where people both enter and exit your auction items. It keeps everything contained in one area and at check out time, it makes things more manageable. If I could do one thing over, I would make sure that a table was pulled in front of the entrance/exit so at distribution time, only the people handing auction items out are able to be in that area.
But above all, relax and enjoy your event. The event that you spent so much time planning!
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