Organizations of all shapes and sizes, including non-profits, schools, public groups, and charities, understand the very real need to raise funds for their respective causes. A friendly and proven method of successfully doing so is to hold an auction. This is a great way to involve your community with your organization in a fun and interesting way, while simultaneously encouraging them to open their wallets and give to a cause that they support.

To maximize the benefit and return on your auction fundraising efforts, you might consider using an auction software specifically designed to manage these kinds of events.

Online Auctions

Rather than trying to manage an online auction via paper and telephone methods, a good online auction software provides a turnkey solution for an organization to easily setup and customize a website that provides for user registration and database tracking of auction participants and bid items.

Administrators are able to intuitively organize the layout of the online auction by product category, starting bid prices, buy now options, sponsors, featured items for sale, etc. Additionally, pictures and images as well as descriptions of sale items can be uploaded in template ready fashion. The auction website can even dynamically rotate through featured items to keep things fresh and new for participants as they browse through auction inventory.

On the back office administration side of things, the website will track and maintain all bidder information, inventory, sales and revenue, etc. The software even allows you to pull a variety of reports from your auction management dashboard whenever you need.

Live Auctions

Want to do a live auction event? You will still need a way to manage all bidder and inventory information. Our auction software includes a database that is capable of handling a live auction event as well. Participating bidders can either pre-register or register onsite, and you can pre-manage all auction inventory listings in the software database as well.

The potential advantage here is that you can even offer a “pre-auction bidding” where attendees can evaluate and bid in advance of the live auction event. This is especially useful for high ticket items that participants may need time to research the value of (e.g. a new car, or an exotic vacation). In the absence of time to understand the value of such items, people tend to underbid and not meet established value thresh holds for sale. In other words, pre-auction bidding helps to maximize your fund raising efforts by allowing attendees more time and evaluation for pricing.

Closing out the Auction

Auction software can really simplify the process of check-out after an auction closes. Winners are linked to items won. With appropriate tools, administrators can quickly generate documentation of sale and handle payment transactions via online payment or credit card swiper. You can decide how you’d like to do it, and the system will help you do so. It can even help you track and follow up with any incomplete orders.