The doors open at 6 for preview. Number calling starts at 8 and the whole evening ends between 10:30 and 11:30.
Yes, we do serve food.
This year, because we served dinner, we charged $20 to attend, which includes one sheet of tickets. In years past, we charged $12, gave one sheet of tickets but only served snacks.
Our event is adults only. We have gotten alot of pushback from mothers who want to bring their kids. We continually tell them no but they keep asking.
Holly,
Yes, we have bags placed in front of all the baskets with the corresponding #'s on them. The bags are also color coded as well so that there can be no mistakes.
Tricky tray, chinese auction and basket auction are the same thing.
A silent auction is different.
As I understand it, a silent auction with bid sheets is done where people put their names down on paper and place a monetary value next to their names, which indicates how much they are will to pay for the item. If someone else wants the same item, they must then outbid the previous person and so on. Therefore the person willing to spend the most money wins.
We don't do it that way at all.
We solicit local businesses, global businesses, families etc and put together baskets of like items. People who attend then buy tickets, as I stated before and these tickets are put into bags. Our 1st grade teachers run the event where the tickets are mixed up and a winner is drawn out of the bag.
There are alot of gambling implications where I live (NJ) and children are not allowed at these types of functions. Ours is an adults only evening.
Hope this is clear.
I have a question for you--almost used up-- do the participants then place their tickets in a specific container in front of the basket they'd like to win or do those certain colored baskets all share one container? I hope that makes sense? I was planning on doing the bid sheets for our auction. They've never really done a big silent auction and I've secured many nice items for this year. Our auction in held in conjuction with the school's spring carnival and raffle.
What is the difference between a silent auction and tricky tray?
Oh, yes- I forgot to mention, it is IMPERATIVE that the colors be kept separate. We used colored ribbons and table cloths to match the color of the basket. For example, yellow baskets (<$75) were wrapped in clear cello with big yellow bows and all lined up numerically together on yellow tableclothes.
Mary jo,
We do a tricky tray at my son's school and do things a bit differently.
We group the baskets by total price of what is in them. We use the tickets that come on sheets from Party City. There are 25 tickets on each sheet.We have 4 sets of prices:
Less than $75 ($8.00 a sheet), From $75 to $200 ($10 a sheet), Greater than $200 ($15 a sheet)
and then we also ask each classroom to pick a theme and put together a basket($12 a sheet). We have 25 classrooms in our K-4 school.
We have about 350 baskets at our tricky tray and raised $18,000 last year. It works best if people think they are getting a decent bang for their buck. Some people spend more at these events, some less, but we expect people to spend $60 on average. ($18,000 net / 300 in attendance = $60 per person). All the schools in our district run these events and they all raise from 10K to 25K.
Agreed that running an auction is a huge, huge, HUGE amount of work but we haven't found an event that can match the revenue making power.
