Auction Tips

5 Things that can Improve Your Silent Auction (3/5) - Pre-Bidding

For those of you having a silent auction at your fundraising event, pre-bidding is the practice of opening up your auction beforehand.
For those of you having a silent auction at your fundraising event, pre-bidding is the practice of opening up your auction beforehand.

What is pre-bidding?

For those of you having a silent auction at your fundraising event, pre-bidding is the practice of opening up your auction beforehand. For most, this ranges from 3-5 days prior to the event. If done correctly, pre-bidding can have a profound effect on your overall auction's success. This is what we will discuss in this article.

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The demonstrated advantages of pre-bidding include:

  • Pre-bidding generates more revenue in your auction. 
  • Pre-bidding gets people set up and engaged in your auction prior to the event. 
  • Pre-bidding gives you early insight into what will be your most popular items. 

PRE-REQUISITES TO DOING PRE-BIDDING
We want to share some real-world examples of pre-bidding's impact on an auction's revenue. But before we do that, we need to cover some pre-requisites to making it work well:

  1. Pre-bidding works best using a mobile/online bidding system. 
  2. You need to be able to communicate with your bidders to recruit them to pre-bidding. 

Once you have the word out, you can start to track people getting connected and bidding. During the pre-bidding period, continue to encourage signup and bidding on specific items. Promote your auction early and often.

Let's review a few examples of how this has worked well for some organizations.

PRE-BIDDING'S IMPACT ON SILENT AUCTION REVENUE - SOME REAL-WORLD EXAMPLES
We have a number of success stories related to pre-bidding and Handbid. Here, we will look at two of them. Aspen View Elementary and Heritage Elementary School both effectively used pre-bidding to increase their overall auction revenue.

 

GET OUR E-BOOK TO LEARN ABOUT THE  POSITIVE IMPACTS OF USING PRE-BIDDING!
We have a lot of great tips to share as well as real-world results on how pre-bidding has impacted overall silent auction performance.  

"Because of Handbid we did 3x the amount [we did last year] during the week our auction was open and have received so many compliments from families and staff of Aspen View.” - Heather Ritchie 

We hope you found this blog helpful. If you download the eBook, please come back here and post any comments or questions you have after reading it.  If you are interested in learning more about Handbid and our auction platform, please reach out to us directly.  

 

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