The goal for all silent auction best practices is the same: to engage and excite people, so they feel more compelled to bid on auction items. With the rise of mobile bidding, there are more ways to engage people than ever, but it can still be a challenge to get and keep their attention.
However, understanding silent auction best practices and how to implement them will maximize your fundraiser’s potential and the money it generates.
Key Takeaways
- Understanding your audience will enable you to connect with them effectively and tailor your fundraiser to their interests.
- Great prizes are key. They don’t need to be high cost, but they need to appeal to bidders.
- Appeal to people’s competitive instincts. A mobile bidding platform can help fuel bidding wars.
- Engage with potential participants early and often through e-mail and social media to build excitement.
Why Engagement Matters for Silent Auctions
Engagement is vital to the success of any silent auction because it means people are getting excited about your fundraiser. The more they’re engaged, the more likely they are to bid on items and help your organization meet its fundraising goals. Using silent auction best practices helps ensure your audience not only knows about your fundraiser but also gets engaged.
10 Ways to Increase Your Silent Auction Engagement
1. Identify Your Audience
This is a critical part of any silent auction strategy, because if you get it wrong, it’s just so much more difficult to engage with the bidders you’re hoping will engage with your fundraiser.
If you’re running a silent auction in conjunction with a golf tournament, you’ll have different prizes and use different strategies than if your silent auction is supporting a school that needs new equipment.
Identifying your audience is an important first step when following silent auction best practices.
2. Pick the Right Prizes
You want prizes that will get people excited about placing bids. Once you know your audience, think about what sort of items they might find appealing.
Bigger doesn’t always mean better, either. Some auctions may benefit from having high-cost, high-value items, such as an all-inclusive vacation, available. While others may find that having curated, locally sourced items with practical, day-to-day value drives more bids.
3. Variety Matters
This goes hand in hand with picking the right prizes, but it’s important to have prizes that appeal to a wide variety of people. What interests one bidder may not appeal to another, so a key silent auction strategy that drives engagement is making sure there’s something for everyone.
4. Connect Early
Building anticipation is an important piece of silent auction best practices. By connecting well in advance with your audience, you get them thinking about what items they might be interested in and give them time to plan.
With mobile bidding software like Bid Beacon, you can promote your silent auction through e-mail and social media to build awareness and get people excited and engaged. You can use traditional silent auction advertising means, too.
5. Use Mobile Bidding Software
Online silent auctions let more people participate in your fundraiser while making it easier to bid and keep track of items. With an online platform like Bid Beacon, everyone participating in your silent auction can place bids directly from their own device, such as a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or desktop.
If you’re running your silent auction simultaneously with another fundraising event, it means the attendees don’t have to wait in line to make a bid or step away from other festivities to participate. That keeps them engaged and makes it easy for them.
6. Showcase Items
Once people are aware of your auction, they’ll want to know what items are available for bidding. One of the great advantages of using mobile bidding software is that your auction will have its own landing page where anyone who’s invited can get a look at the items that will be available before the event even starts.
When considering silent auction display ideas, remember that photos are important. That builds anticipation and ramps up excitement.
7. Have Clear Start & End Times
Having clear start and end times doesn’t just make it easier to organize a silent auction; it also adds a ticking clock that fuels the competitive spirit among bidders. They can plan to place a bid early on an item they really want and can then watch as their (friendly) rivals place bids themselves. As the clock ticks down toward the final deadline, the sense of anticipation only builds.
8. Allow for Outside Bidding
With traditional silent auctions, only attendees at an event were able to place bids. That’s not the case anymore. With mobile bidding, you, as the organizer, get to choose who participates and can include people who may not be able to join your fundraiser in person.
Nothing gets people more engaged than a bidding war, and by widening your net for potential participants, you increase the likelihood of more bids.
9. Drive Competitiveness
Nothing drives engagement more than a bidder knowing there’s someone else going after the item they want. It gets the competitive juices flowing and will keep them checking in regularly on that item’s status. Bidding wars can be a lot of fun, and they’re great for bringing in revenue for your organization. With Bid Beacon, bidders can track the status of their items right on their device and even get instantly notified if they’ve been outbid.
10. Make Payments Easy
If silent auction participants feel like the process is too complicated (especially when it comes to paying), it can drive down engagement. With Bid Beacon, organizers can set up their online silent auction so that guests are required to provide a credit card when they register and will be charged automatically once they’ve won. It’s simple and straightforward, which fits perfectly with silent auction best practices.
Bid Beacon also offers alternative ways for organizers to collect payment, but the approach above is certainly the most convenient for everyone involved.
How Bid Beacon Can Help Your Silent Auction Best Practices
Online silent auctions are helping organizations reach more people and meet their fundraising goals. With a mobile bidding platform like Bid Beacon, your organization can easily incorporate silent auction best practices in a number of key ways:
- Setting up a landing page that makes it easy for participants to register and view items available for bidding in advance.
- Connect directly with potential participants through social media and email.
- Easy payment removes barriers to entry.
- Bids can be made directly from any device, and it’s easy to track their status. Notifications are even sent automatically when outbid, making it more likely to increase bid totals.
Host Your Next Silent Auction with Bid Beacon
When you integrate these silent auction best practices into your planning, you’ll see more engagement and higher bids. That, in turn, helps your organization meet its fundraising goals. Bid Beacon’s easy-to-use mobile bidding software simplifies the silent auction process for both organizers and participants and will help you execute your silent auction strategy.
Find out more about how Bid Beacon can benefit your organization by contacting us today.
FAQs About Silent Auction Best Practices
Who can participate in an online silent auction with Bid Beacon?
That’s entirely up to you. If you choose to share the link to your silent auction publicly or on social media, anyone will be able to participate. You do have the option of removing unwanted guests, though.
What should I do if there are items that aren’t receiving bids?
These items may actually be really interesting to a lot of bidders because they won’t carry a high price tag. One of the more common silent auction best practices is highlighting items that aren’t receiving bids, and with Bid Beacon, you can group these items together and even make sure they’re displayed first.
