Top Tips for Online Fundraising Auctions

In this article we outline tips and provide some fundraising auction ideas to optimise your online fundraising. 

What is an Online Fundraising Auction?

An online fundraising auction occurs online for a set duration, ranging from a few hours to several weeks, aimed at raising funds. This can be for a charity, a non-profit organisation, an individual, a company, or a cause. 

Clarity and transparency about the fundraising goal

Whether you are fundraising for a charity, individual, cause or other organisation, we recommend stating clearly throughout your auction description and marketing where the proceeds of the auction are going. In particular when creating online auctions for nonprofits, we find including some context to the cause, including images and links, are helpful to inform bidders where their donation will go. This also helps encourage bidders to be particularly generous with their bids. 

Alongside including information about the cause (such as a few sentences about the charity and its mission), we also recommend including wording about the fundraising goal in all marketing material, including social media posts, newsletter marketing, and associated press. 

 

Be specific about your ask

Alongside being clear and transparent about your fundraising, we recommend adding additional specific information about your fundraising goal. 

In the instance of creating charity auctions online, this could be in the form of statistics, such as:

‘$1,000 will plant 200 trees’

It could also include adding additional information about where the proceeds will go, such as a specific initiative within your organisation:

‘Proceeds from this auction will allows us to fund our brand-new school building’

Putting a numerical value to how someone’s support will help you achieve your overall goals will help encourage participants to bid generously. 

Consistency across your messaging and branding

Your auction messaging and branding should be consistent across all your marketing materials and channels. We recommend choosing a lead image to use across a variety of channels, as well as some wording that can be used on social media, newsletters and sent to any auction ambassadors. 

If the auction has a number of collaborators, ensure you have logos and wording for them all, for you to include in your messaging as well.

We find that it is useful to create a Comms Pack to send out to interested parties to ensure consistent messaging and easy access to the most important information. Read more about creating a Comms Pack here.

Leverage your community

We understand that fundraising auctions often try to reduce auction running costs, in order to raise as much money as possible for a given cause. As such it’s important to leverage your community and find as many organic ways to promote your auction as possible. 

It’s important to leverage your own community first: this includes your social media audience, your mailing lists, and any in-person communities you have (e.g. a storefront).

Ask everyone who is associated with the auction to promote it; this includes partners, collaborators, creators (e.g. artists), donors, etc. In particular for charity auctions, ambassadors, partners and creators may offer to promote the auction free of charge, in order to support the cause. 

Look beyond your community

When trying to raise money, it’s important to extend your reach as widely as possible. Have a think about who else might be interested in this auction, outside of your immediate community. 

For example, if your auction includes contemporary artwork, there may be a social media group or a gallery associated with that artwork or artist, that would be willing to share it with their audience. 

If you are planning an in-person event in conjunction with your online timed auction, there may be events pages or groups that would be interested in sharing this. 

If your auction includes donations from high-profile individuals or pop culture, there may fan communities around these items that would be interested in hearing about the auction.

These collaborations could be in the form of paid partnerships or reciprocal promotions.