The final numbers are in from our March event and they are great. Thanks to the great ideas on this site, we increased our profits by 25% this year, with a total profit of $25,000 for our school! This is the first year that any of us on the committee so we learned a lot of things that will come in handy next year, and our goal is to grow it by another 50%. Our auction ran over 4 hours. It is easy to fill that time frame and keep people engaged. We had several walk around raffles that brought in serious cash (about $2000) that weren't really planned until a couple of weeks prior. The facility we held the event at donated a nice variety of meat for a meat raffle at the last minute which raised over $1,000.
While this site helped to identify some of the big companies that donate, I echo a lot of others on here..you need to solicit every business you can think of, restaurants, liquor stores, grocery stores, golf courses, movie theaters, etc. We were able to obtain 50 bottles of wine from various donors and then did a wine pull, selling corks for $10 each..it was an easy $500 profit. My other recommendation is to get creative! As a parochial school, we approached our two parish priests to see if they would be willing to donate an evening of their time (dinner with the pastor, etc). Those were two of the highest dollar items sold during our vocal auction and there was no cost involved. I would also recommend taking a serious look at consignment bidding. We used
www.winspireme.com/ to offer a couple of once-in-a-lifetime items for vocal auction. Although none of them sold this year (there is no risk to your organization) those items drew up a lot of buzz in the community before the event. We expect that next year we will be able to sell at least one of those experiences.
