We were trying to come up with a more creative way to award it and in the end we just awarded it to the person whose birthday was the closest to that evening. The other idea being floated was to put a sticker on the bottom of one chair at each table and the person sitting on that chair would win it. You can really do it anyway you like we just waited to the last minute and went the birthday route to make it easy on us.
We delegate the work into sub-committies as this is such a huge undertaking. We have a meeting specifically for the Tricky Tray and we ask the class mothers to make sure they attend as they pick their theme class baskets at this time as well.
The sub-committies we normally have chairpeople for are as follows:
SOLICITING - this is broken into 2 groups. One group sends all the letters for coporate donations and the other group goes to all the local stores for donations.
ADVERTISING - They run ads for ticket sales in all the local papers and put flyers for ticket sales in all the local store windows.
TICKET SALES- This is the person who can be contacted to purchase tickets. They make sure everyone gets their tickets and they are in charge of the seating arrangements.
GIFT BAGS - We give out gift bags to all that attend. Filled with odds and ends they got as donations specifically for these bags. Our last gift bag had pens, nail files, magnets, gum, mints, calendar books,recipie booklets, various coupons, etc...
CENTERPIECES - One person did all the centerpieces for each table the night of the event that were won by one person at each table.
At our last one we did bottles of wine that were wrapped and decorated. Ours was held in a banquet hall and not at school otherwise we could not have done wine.
BASKET WRAPPING - Their job was to coordinate when and where the basket making would take place, to get the volunteers to do the work, and to have all the materials needed to wrap the baskets.
TRANSPORTATION - ours was not held at the school and 2 people were in charge of coordinating and getting the volunteers who transported all the baskets and the prizes to the venue the morning of the event.
SET UP - Coordinating and getting the volunteers to set up all the prizes.
Thank you both so much! I will definitely sit down and start listing the different committees, then maybe post a sign-up on the website and see if I get any volunteers that way. Then I guess at the first meeting after school starts I can ask for more volunteers to sign-up. Sound good?
I admire your spirit. Running an auction means that you oversee all aspects to make sure that no stone is left unturned but that you don't try to do everything yourself.
You need to get as many people involved as possible. It's best to break down each part of the event into subcommittees with one point person reporting to you. We run it with the following: Solicitation, food, runners, program, tickets, set up, clean up and publicity. Many of these functions overlap. We meet monthly to report on our progress. Most of us are not new to auctions but still, each event can be improved and all volunteers should be open to change.
We all manage our portion differenty but most do their work on computers and save hard copies to master notebook to be handed off when completed.
Key things to remember are to get your permits early and keep lines of communication open.
There are many auction resources on this site.
Good luck.
Your job is to make sure the event is a big success! I'm sure you'll do great...I always like to think of a big job and think how I can break it up into "smaller pieces". Perhaps if you have any willing volunteers, you can give them specific jobs: Location chairman, donations chairman, ticket chairman, etc. Does that make sense? I might give each "chairman" a notebook with their "job description". This might be too detailed but it's the way I like to break down a big event into little chunks.
Good luck!
SHC
