Looking for help, advice, ideas, for silent auction donations in the Chicagoland area or Northern Indiana. Trying hard to get trips or "experiences" in Chicago. Any ideas will be greatly appreciate!

I love these very specific examples for what to raffle with a deck of cards or glasses of champagne, as it's sometimes hard to decide what may be popular enough. I am especially glad to hear that you were able to sell out of each of them.

Thanks also for reminding me that Black Friday deals are also good for charity's sake, even if some of us don't like shopping them for ourselves.

Very clever dough sale name, too. Thanks for being generous with the ideas!

Renee Z

I've referenced this page for the last few years and would like add some ideas. We have an annual auction for a Lutheran school in a rural area of Michigan. Here are some of our successes.

Local Jeweler sponsored an event raffle called "Champagne and Ice" The first year, we set up 50 champagne glass numbered 1-50. Each glass cost $20 and the buyer received a glass of champagne or sparkling juice along with a chance to win a .64 carat unset diamond. The jeweler donated the diamond. This raised $1000. We did it again last year and did 75 glasses, raising $1500.

Local Gun Shop donated two hunting rifles - one a matched pair youth model and an adult model 30-30. For these, we also did a special raffle, selling a full deck of cards (54 including jokers) - ripping each card in half, one to buyer, one to the jar. We sold each card for $10 - and easily sold out of cards raising $540 per card game.

We purchased an American Girl doll through a special Today Show offer (Jill's Steals and Deals) which included doll and set of clothes valued at $154 (purchased for $78). We also did a card game for this at $10 a card - earning $540 for something that probably would have went for live auction at around $120-$150.

We did a final card game for an Ipad Mini 16gb that was donated and valued at around $200. Same thing - sold a deck of cards for $10 each and raised $540 for something that would have gone for around $200 or so.

We did an "Experience Chicago" trip with donations from Field Museum and Willis Tower. The Hard Rock Hotel Chicago has a program to buy rooms at discounted rates for charities. We had a donor sponsor this item and also purchased gift cards for Garret Popcorn, Giordiano Pizza, and Ghirardelli Chocolate. This sold for $675.

We had a local bakery donate ten loaves of bread which we added either from $5 -$50 and named it "Bread with some extra Dough!". These loaves were a hot commodity and really generated some intense bidding selling from $50 to $125/ea. People were in the charitable mood for these!

We purchased many items on Black Friday sales and/or January clearance sales for our silent auction. You can easily double or triple your investment.

We package a lot of vacation getaways and other items (TV, Roku, stand, DVDs, etc) and make it harder for people to quantify the cost. They tend to go for a lot more than cost - mainly because of convenience of having everything together and the value seems great.

Hope that helps!

I put together 10/12 of the raffle baskets this year for a fundraiser at our fall carnival and I requested donations from almost every link I found on here and got NOTHING donated by a national companies. I figured out quickly that so many of these links are being bombarded with requests now, that they either have a certain time frame in which you can request or they've stopped donating to PTOs altogether. I personally called Keurig and was told that they used to give to most anyone that asked, however their kindness was rewarded with their name being posted to every board as a donation source and suddenly their requests went from a few a month to 1000s a month. I was extremely lucky in getting very nice things donated by local companies, even our DNR gave me several items, a cabin stay, a magazine subscription to our states magazine and a camper rental. I was new to this and had no idea how to start, so my advice to any other first timer is, go ahead and try with the local companies, but don't count on them. These lists are a double edged sword. Someone may have had luck but once they post the information and 10,000 other people see it and also request a donation, companies start adding restrictions.

Anonymous wrote: Hi does anyone know of a website that I can try to request Caribbean Vacations from? I see everyone has them at their tricky trays and I am having a hard time finding something like that online thanks for you help

If you google "Elite Caribbean Resort" donation request, you should find the one we used! Our event was this weekend, and Elite sent us six vacations. Their donation is the room only. Their materials (which we received along with their donation) are VERY clear about the additional cost, which is basically for food and activities, as these are "all inclusive" resorts.

I was EXTREMELY nervous about presenting this at our auction; in fact, we almost didn't do it. After further research (they also provide you with a direct number for the representative that can help answer any questions about their packages), we decided to go for it and just be REALLY clear about all the fine print! We posted all the info and kept this in the "silent auction" section of our event. We did not want to put it in the live auction, as we didn't want people to misunderstand and/or get caught up in the moment and have buyer's remorse when they totaled up the cost after the daily fee (ranging from $115-140/person/day for the ones we received).

Out of the 6 they sent us, 4 sold. We got about $1500 in total from these, which is WAY under their value (if you were to purchase a room at the resort), so our bidders were extremely pleased, as they honestly did get a deal. We were happy because it was all profit to us. One of the parents (who ended up purchasing one of these resort trips) actually went to the Elite website and put in all the info as if he was going to purchase a trip. He tried it for February and for October, and if you add up what you will pay in daily fees, plus a few hundred dollars for the room (which of course, benefits the school instead of the resort!), he figured he was paying about half of retail price.

I COMPLETELY understand the skepticism and I was there too! But now that we tried it, all 4 of our bidders were happy (even with the daily fee), I think it would be worth it to do again in the future. I know one couple is planning to use it for their 20th anniversary. The certificate is good for a couple of years as well, so that helps the selling value. We just made sure to start bids low. Hope that helps give some insight on the Elite donations!

Glow with us told me that they do not make donations to silent auctions:(