We have our silent auction, chinese auction/raffle and carnival all on the same night. We don't do any pre-registering either. We are a relatively small school (270 studebnts K-5) and a tight-knit community. We just have bidders put down their name. They can put their phone number if they aren't staying the whole evening in case they win. We set up bidding increments based on the item's value.
we registered at the booth but only asked for name & phone numbers. they had to sign a statement saying if they did not pay by a certain day it would go to the next bidder.
If you're having a silent auction by itself, how do you advertise it? Do you do anything in addition to sending home flyers? Next school year will be our first one and I'll need to explain the process too.
We don't have any sort of pre-registration for our silent auction. We hold ours during our spring carnival. The items are evenly split by value into 3 groups and each group closes at a different time (in waves about 15 min. apart). This way if someone doesn't win an item in the first group they are more comfortable to bid in another group without feeling like they are overextending their funds. We have a place for name & phone # and we preprint the bid increments up to a certain point then they can bid what they want in whole dollars. I hope that makes sense? For instance, if an item is worth $200 and bidding starts at $30 and is pre-printed per line in increments of $5 up to $175 then the lines are blank and the bidders may bid what they want as long as it's at least in $5 increments. This works well for our families and community. Kids are not allowed to bid and we're sure to post that in our rules which are very visable and printed large near the auction area. I also send home the rules with the list of items when we send home the carnival packet. We do accept cc through Discover Network. That was one of the best things we ever did--- signing up with them for our credit card processing. I guess our silent auction isn't quite as formal as others I've read about. But it goes very smoothly for us!
Thanks for the responses. I'd love to hear more. A couple notes.
I agree about the credit cards - I would not do that for our group for exactly the reason stated. Too much liability. But I can understand for large/complex events why it might be done.
On pre-registration, I actually meant before bidding, not before the event starts. Ours wouldn't be a situation where we could collect the information in advance.
If we do a registration, it will be at the door: enter, hand-over ticket, fill out name badge, register for auction. I have ideas about how to manage the traffic flow. The key is not having everyone right there at the entry point writing and creating a bottleneck, but having some writing stations.
All comments welcome.
