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February 27 Seattle Seminar ExperienceLast week we had a booth at the Northwest Development Officers Association Winter Conference in Seattle. We met lots of folks working on behalf of their non-profits, and also got to hear some truly energizing sessions by NDOA members about auctions and events in general.
On the next day, we held a "roadshow" session; we invited clients and prospects to learn more about ways to improve their events and to share their suggestions. April Brown, auctioneer, and author of "Money is Marvelous" and Alison Hart, Marketing Communications Mgr at Auctionpay joined us to share best practices as well.
It was a pleasure to meet some of our clients in person, and get to associate faces with the email addresses and voices over the telephone; we had a great couple of hours together. We invited our guests to share their Best Auction Ideas & Biggest Auction Challenges. We thought you might like seeing these too:
Best Auction Ideas: --Raffle - winner gets choice of live auction item --Landscaping package - hours from landscaping architect, plants, tools, labor --Parking spot closest to school --"Homegrown" items, such as lunch & movie with the principal --Live auction runner that has bidder sign form for final bid, then takes form to checkout/data entry --Hire someone else to do this. --Special project appeal --Do you mean in addition to buying Auction! software? Best thing so far. (from Barbara: "Wow, thank you!") --Start REALLY early in planning Biggest Auction Challenge: --Getting better auction items --Procurement --Getting people to bid higher; our auction has been a place people have come to get "a deal" and often items go for under value. Obvious solution: Professional auctioneer! I'm sold! --Rapid post-event recognition for donors, volunteers, buyers, supporters, attendees, etc. --Because of competition, it has been getting harder to get attendees --Getting enough people to attend --Holding to deadlines --Donor fatigue --Generating more income(!) and higher value items --Bottleneck checkout line --Doing it on totally volunteer group Our guests had some great suggestions and challenges, and we'll do our best to tackle some of these as we continue adding stories here. It was great visiting Seattle (and we loved the seafood and the coffee, too!) TrackbacksThe trackback URL for this entry is: http://auctionsystems.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!C864312468A2E497!170.trak Weblogs that reference this entry
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