For many nonprofits, a live or silent auction is the pinnacle of their fundraising event calendar. Auctions have the potential to generate significant revenue for your mission and keep supporters coming back year after year—if you take steps to engage participants effectively.
One critical success factor in planning an engaging auction is securing high-quality, unique items that appeal to your target audience. However, effective procurement requires a strategic approach so you can use your nonprofit’s resources wisely and maximize the amount of event funding you can put toward your mission.
To help you get started, this guide will discuss four proven tips for procuring auction prizes your audience will want to bid on while sticking to your event budget. Let’s dive in!
1. Understand Your Event’s Audience
Before you make an item wishlist and start sourcing prizes, take some time to think about which supporters you most want to reach with your auction. After all, you can only determine how to procure auction items that appeal to your target audience if you first know who that target audience is and what they’d like to see at your event!
One of the best ways to understand your auction’s target audience is through supporter segmentation, which GivingDNA defines as “a strategy that nonprofits use to separate a donor base into smaller subgroups based on shared traits and characteristics.” These shared traits might include supporters’:
- Demographics: Age, location, education, family status, wealth
- Psychographics: Hobbies, interests, values, lifestyles, cultural backgrounds
- Giving history: Average donation amount, frequency and recency of giving, lifetime value
- Nonprofit engagement: Past event attendance, volunteering, board or committee service, advocacy, interactions with marketing content
Once you’ve created supporter segments based on these criteria, decide which groups to prioritize engaging with your auction, and consider what types of items might interest them.
For example, if your highest-priority segment is major donors, they likely have the desire and financial capacity to bid on luxury vacations and designer goods. But if you want to engage volunteers with young children, consider offering family-friendly prizes (amusement park tickets, popular toys, etc.) and certificates for services (such as childcare or pet-sitting) that would make their busy lives easier.
2. Assemble an Auction Item Procurement Committee
It takes a team to secure even the 12-15 high-quality items you need for a successful live auction—much less the 100 or more prizes you might feature in a silent auction! Several months in advance of your event, recruit staff members with free time in their schedules, board members, and volunteers to form an auction item procurement committee.
At your committee’s first meeting, collaboratively brainstorm an item wishlist. Then, keeping your target audience in mind, prioritize your list based on which prizes are must-haves, which ones would be nice to have, and which ones are backup ideas in case your higher-priority items fall through.
Once you have your finalized wishlist, divide up sourcing responsibilities based on each committee member’s skills and connections. For instance, if you think it’ll take some negotiating for a nearby amusement park to contribute free or reduced-price tickets, put a board member with excellent negotiation skills in charge of securing those. Or, if one of your volunteers works at a local museum, have them ask their boss about contributing an annual museum membership as an auction prize.
3. Choose the Right Procurement Method for Each Item
As you send your committee members out to procure their assigned items, make sure they’re familiar with the three primary ways of doing so. Winspire’s live auction item ideas guide explains that each method is best suited to different types of items as follows:
- In-kind donations: Physical goods and gift certificates
- Nonprofit discounts: Ticketed experiences (concerts, athletic events, etc.)
- Consignment auction item providers: Travel packages, since it’s often challenging to piece those together through donations or discounts
Since in-kind donations are free to your organization, procure as many items through that method as possible. However, the types of items that are best secured via nonprofit discounts or on consignment will often be your biggest-ticket auction prizes, so make sure you have room in your event budget for those purchases.
4. Leverage Corporate Sponsorships
While individual donors can be instrumental in providing donated or discounted auction items, it’ll be easiest to secure many of these prizes through your nonprofit’s corporate partners. Here are some ways to make the most of event sponsorships for auction item procurement:
- Contact businesses in your existing sponsor network first, since they’ll likely be the easiest to get on board with contributing to your event, having previously supported your organization.
- Approach new potential sponsors strategically—choose businesses that sell goods or services on your must-have list and whose values align with your nonprofit’s mission.
- Be prepared to pivot so that if sponsors turn down your initial request, you can offer a backup item donation idea or ask them to support your event financially instead.
- Ensure sponsor relationships are mutually beneficial by providing free publicity via your event signage and marketing materials for any businesses that provide items.
If you can develop an auction item sponsorship agreement that benefits your nonprofit and the business, you’ll set your organization up for a long-term, highly advantageous partnership within your community.
5. Collect Data on Auction Item Sales
Like with most fundraisers, referencing past data in the planning process can greatly boost your auction’s success. If your nonprofit has previously hosted auctions, review the information you collected on item sales to inform your prize selection and procurement methods this time around.
However, if your organization is holding an auction for the first time, make sure to track the following item-related data points throughout your event:
- Percentage of total items sold
- Number of bids per item
- Average bid amount
- Items that sold for higher than their starting bid amount
- Items that sold at or above their fair market value
Collecting and analyzing this information shows how valuable and appealing auction participants thought your items were. Additionally, when you send out your post-event survey, include questions about the prize selection so supporters can give direct input on which items they’d like to see again at future auctions and which ones you should consider replacing with new ideas.
Once your team has gone through the auction item procurement process a few times, you’ll start to figure out which strategies are most effective for your nonprofit. However, you should continue to conduct audience analysis, build relationships with corporate sponsors, and collect item sale data to improve your efforts with each event. Happy fundraising!
