With everything from procurement to decorations, your volunteers have worked hard to prepare for your event. Now that event-night is here, they want to enjoy all the details by participating fully in the auction and other activities. A volunteer trade allows you to hand tasks during your event over to guest volunteers so that your volunteers can bid, visit and enjoy the outcome of all their hard work.

How it Works

A volunteer trade is an agreement to switch volunteers with another organization for specific tasks during your events. For example, you send your volunteers to take registrations and monitor the silent auction at their event and they do the same for your event.

A volunteer trade frees up your volunteers during your event so they can:

• Bid on items
• Get the party rolling
• Motivate the crowd
• Meet and mingle with new donors and contacts
• Enjoy the food, decorations, and entertainment they helped to organize

Getting Started

To organize a volunteer trade, look for area nonprofits with similar events. These organizations should agree with you on what a quality event looks like and how to run a smooth event. Training and coordination is simple if partnering organizations both use Auctionpay. We know many schools and organizations that this works for year after year.

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Limit Distractions

It is important to remember that nothing else should be happening during the live auction. Your entire goal during this time is to keep your audience seated and bidding. When the live auction is over, any other entertainment can begin. If you have an outstanding band or comedian who will be a part of the event, schedule them after the silent and live auctions are over. This entices your guests to stay around for the big draw of the evening, after you have made your money!

Keep Every Guest in the Room

Do not be tempted to open your raffle or any other diversion during your live auction. You want your entire audience in the room. The more people who are present, the more excitement you have in the room. Your guests who are not bidding will be entertained, and the guests who are bidding will be encouraged to bid higher and more often!

About the author

Louis Murad is a strategic partner in ensuring the success of your benefit auction. For more information, visit http://www.muradauctions.com.

Kim Macfee from Mission Parish School (a private school in San Juan Capistrano, CA) shares this event success story and tips for event planners.

Success Story:

"Our annual fundraiser in December was silky smooth. We registered 350 at the beginning of the evening within 45 minutes and only 6 people required cash checkout at the end of the night. Five of our six cashiering volunteers were back enjoying the event within minutes. Auctionpay makes checkout & cashiering the position to volunteer for…there's nothing to it, literally."

Auctionpay Tip:

"Train your registration volunteers to ask, 'What card will be using for your purchases this evening?'– don't offer options."

Suggested tip for other event planners:

Kim suggested an idea that we have seen work for many auctions that also sell non-auction items such as raffle tickets, t-shirts, etc. Guests must pre-swipe with Auctionpay to use this option.

"Create express slips for non-auction merchandise sales – include: bid number, merchandise purchased, quantity, extended amount and a signature. The slips don’t have to be entered until the next day. Have separate envelopes for slips bundled by merchandise type. This eases the post-event effort to track revenue to the correct source and while simple, is very effective." Click here to see an example.

Auctionpay Event Software is now available in a hosted edition that allows users to access and use all of the software features remotely through any PC with Internet access.

Advantages of the hosted edition:

• Enables remote access for all users from any PC with an Internet connection.
• Avoids database merging issues between multiple users.
• Fully compatible with the offline version of the software so users can take the data to the event and back, working online and offline.
• Identical interface so users don't need to relearn software.
• Besides hosting the software and databases, Auctionpay also takes care of daily database backups.

If you would like more information on the Hosted Edition software, contact Auctionpay today at 800-276-5992 or email info@auctionpay.com.