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6 Ways To Save Time With Your Next Online Auction

By Whit Hunter

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The nonprofit sector today faces a challenging contradiction. According to the Nonprofit Finance Fund, while demand for their services keeps rising, financial sustainability is a major concern for most nonprofits. This was all before the COVID-19 pandemic brought new obstacles for nonprofits to overcome.

To succeed in today’s changing climate, it goes beyond getting creative with your fundraising efforts. Charity auctions have long been a staple in the fundraising world. But traditional auctions require a lot of logistical management. That’s just one reason why online auctions offer a better approach to fundraising for many nonprofits today.

With the right tools, this virtual solution even has the potential to outperform in-person events — while saving you more time and money in the process.

The Benefits of Online Auctions

Nonprofits with an online strategy can take their exposure and fundraising to new heights. Today’s online tools help to:

  • Expand your reach beyond geographic boundaries.
  • Automate administrative needs.
  • Track analytics to help allocate budget wisely.

Online auctions also help your nonprofit maximize potential donations by aligning with today’s consumer behaviors. The platform offers participants:

  • Bidding opportunity from anywhere, on any device.
  • Social sharing that broadens your auction’s reach.
  • All the information they need to have confidence in their bid, like a gallery of images, terms and conditions, and the value their support brings your organization.

The combination of supporter convenience, virtual reach, and administrative automation leads to better fundraising outcomes — and with less work for you and your team.

Online Auction Tips To Save Time

As a nonprofit leader, time is your most valuable resource. By running an online auction, you’re saving time your team would spend planning, organizing, and managing a large scale event.

These six strategies will help your team to spend less time raising donations and more time using the funds for projects that serve your mission.

Make Gathering Items Simpler

A successful auction starts with the inventory of items you offer. Brainstorm what type of items will help your nonprofit reach its fundraising goal and then reach out to possible donors for their support.

As you start sourcing items for your auction, the BetterWorld platform helps you manage the process more efficiently. When a donor offers their support, you can email an item donation form so that they upload all the information for you. This form is customizable as well, so you can edit the welcome message and personalize your donor appeal.

With your auction inventory growing automatically, you can manage items as you need, including:

  • Making edits to the description, value, and starting bid.
  • Changing the photo or adding to an item’s image gallery.
  • Copying and duplicating items so there’s no starting from scratch if you have several of the same item up for bid.

Build Excitement With Quality Visuals

The first step to a successful virtual auction is to build an inventory of promotional creatives. Your team saves time with access to a range of marketing materials compatible with the platforms you use, like social media, email, or blogging.

This stock could include series of posts like:

  • General event details with follow-up reminders.
  • Templates you can easily edit to promote individual auction items.
  • Video clips, images, and short stories that explain your nonprofit’s mission and the specific cause your fundraiser supports.

To grab potential donor’s interest, you need to highlight the stars of the show: your auction items. For most of your items, you don’t even need to spend time and money with a professional photoshoot. Unless it’s a truly unique item, save efforts by sourcing royalty-free, easy-to-download images that showcase what your auction has to offer.

Leverage Automation

With no need for organizing a venue or vendors, opting for a virtual auction limits the logistics you have to manage. The right tools take even more administrative burdens off your team’s hands. Automation ensures no detail gets overlooked — and used strategically, you can keep bidding momentum higher for longer.

A comprehensive online auction host like BetterWorld handles details like automated receipts that include a personalized donor message, payment information, and tax deduction details. You can also leverage even more automatic features that take administrative tasks off your plate, such as:

Want to raise more from your auction? Try BetterWorld’s Auction Tool for FREE!

  • Seamless online and in-person actions that raise more

  • Incredibly easy to set up, backed by an amazing support team

  • Thoughtful automations that save you dozens of hours 

  • Thousands of dollars of “Instant Items” you can use in your auction at no cost

Start Your Auction Now!

Stay Ahead of Potential Issues

Online auctions have fewer logistics and moving pieces, meaning there’s less opportunity for things to go wrong. With great communication and reliable auction software, you can help avoid management challenges.

BetterWorld makes it easier to mitigate problems that do arise as well, with built-in features that:

Coordinate Your Team

Ultimately, even with the best online auction software, you can’t automate everything. Make sure your staff members and event volunteers have clear, specific roles. Designated roles help to avoid work overlap.

The scale and style of your event will dictate what roles you need to assign. At a minimum, you should assign team members to:

  • Design creative promotional content.
  • Manage marketing outreach.
  • Procure items to auction off.
  • Field questions from potential bidders.

Just as online auctions extend your reach to new donors, you can easily recruit volunteers to help organize and manage your event remotely — no matter where a supporter is based.

BetterWorld’s platform optimizes this staff and volunteer management so you’re not creating extra work for yourself by fielding more support. The system allows for unlimited admin users, making it simple to onboard all contributors and keep them seamlessly working in concert.

Take All the Support You Can Get

To get the greatest benefit from these virtual auction tools, they need to be simple and easy to use. BetterWorld’s platform offers just that. With this software, you can set up a customized online auction in minutes.

The system’s features already help take the hassle out of event planning and management. But we’re dedicated not to just your fundraiser’s smooth delivery — we’re invested in its success.

Our dedicated concierge service offers on-demand support and strategic guidance so you’re not only saving time with your next online auction. You’ve got a built-in team of experts committed to maximizing fundraising results.

Sign up to enjoy free lifetime access to better nonprofit support. We’ll help you save time, increase your exposure, and ensure you receive 100% of donations from every fundraising effort.

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Whit Hunter
AUTHOR

About Whit Hunter

Whit Hunter is the co-founder of BetterWorld, the free, easy-to-use online fundraising platform. His passion for empowering nonprofits and tech expertise have shaped BetterWorld’s mission to make fundraising more accessible and efficient.

Whit's innovative vision has helped countless organizations raise more funds and reach their goals, driving BetterWorld’s ongoing success.

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