Seth Godin posted a great article on marketing the charity auction.

“The Robin Hood Foundation raised more than 24 million dollars at their last auction, because people competed to overpay. And that’s the secret. The story the charity must tell is: “don’t pay $19 for this twenty dollar bill, don’t even pay $30, we need you to pay $40!” The satisfaction of overpaying (whether you overpay anonymously or in public) is what they sell, not a bargain.

This is not the easy path. It is much easier to sell your public on bargains than it is to sell them on generosity. The good news is that once you get over the hump, it scales. Bargains scale downward… better bargains are lower-priced bargains, which means you scale to zero. Philanthropy scales upward… better overpaying is more overpaying. A public auction is always a public competition. The challenge is to create social approval for what would otherwise be bad auction skills! Enlist a few stooges in the audience in advance, then start by auctioning off that $20 bill. When it goes for $45 and the winner gets an ovation, you’ve set a tone.”

How was your last charity auction? Did you feel like philanthropists Bill & Melinda Gates or a Kmart shopper?

Marketing a school auction is critical, managing the mechanics behind the scenes can make marketing easier.

I volunteered for my kids’ school auction for the last several years and that experience helped fuel starting TownConnect. TownConnect now helps organize and connect school auction committee members, meetings, and documents but there is way too much to manage for one solution.

The process of collecting donation items, writing appropriate descriptions, and managing the process is time consuming and manually intensive. Our Parent Teacher Organization uses a desktop product, Auction! to manage donors, items donated and to populate the auction catalog. Auction! does everything they need but doesn’t leverage the web.  The issue the amount of data entry being bottlenecked through one or two moms who get overloaded.

We evaluated an online auction vendor, Cmarket, who lets you run a web auction online like eBay and actually supplies a ongoing catalog use for donations. Good solution for marketing the auction beyond the typical live auction audience (grandparents and relatives) but it didn’t do what needed to automate the live event and seemed costly without a guarantee on return.

We decided to move as much online as we could without completely disrupting the auction process (or angering moms who are still looking for the “any” key on their computer).

What we came up with was simple, cheap and easy enough for non-technical people to setup.

We used online form software from Y Combinator startup, Wufoo, to sell tickets and accept direct donations as well as automate the donation process. Wufoo integrates easily with Google Checkout which offers fee-free credit card processing for non-profits.

We embedded the Wufoo form into the PTO website, included a link in the PTO email and parents got buy tickets and donate without filling out ten pieces of paper with their name on it. Google direct deposits the cash into the PTO bank account and the PTO had ecommerce.

How does your school manage charity auctions and fundraising?