They are always a lot of work. And I have to say that $12,000 earned for only 136 people attending is incredible! What was your ticket price and what did you serve for dinner (just curious)?
We hold ours at a banquet hall. So dinner is served without any work on our part. I have also been to one held a Boys & Girls Club where their organization in the hall runs a snack bar so people can just go buy whatever they want. Doing things like that can certainly alleviate the stress of you and your group having to serve anything yourselves.
We beak down all the areas of planning the event (soliciting, advertisement, ticket sales, basket preperation, set up.....etc.) and send home a sign up sheet asking folks to sign up to help in whatever areas they can. We get a decent response.
Lastly we now use high school kids to run our prizes for us. They get community service for helping out. Older Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, & Honor Society kids are always looking for ways to earn community service hours.
We just raised $12,000 at our dinner and auction. We had over 180 silent items and 32 live items. We had approx 136 people attend this year.
My question to the list is how can we simplfy the next auction. I have had such a hard time finding volunteers So I pretty much have worked on this alone from August until January. In January I had 2 or 3 people start helping me. We went all out with a theme, decorations, dinner, etc. It seems to be an awful lot of work for $12,000. (Per my husband I might as well go back to work full time and get paid!!! NO THANKS!)
Do any of you have a dessert or appetizer type auction rather than serving dinner? IT seems to me it would be a lot simpler.
