Streamline Your Fundraiser Experience with High-Quality Partners

Planning and executing a fundraiser is a big undertaking! There’s a million moving parts, from finding a venue, collecting donations, accepting bids, and more. The best way to make sure your fundraiser runs smoothly and successfully is by partnering with people and organizations who are experts in different parts of the process so you can benefit from their experience and knowledge. Auctria provides best-in-class auction software that helps you manage everything from the first donation to the last receipt and all the activity and bidding in between. Mission First is your one-stop website that houses event fundraising details, travel experience procurement, and more. Combine the two and you’ll be prepared to run a successful fundraiser without driving yourself crazy!

Let’s maximize your fundraising with a few tips from Auctria and Mission First.

1. Sell your sponsorships

2. Sell your seats

3. Streamline the donor experience

Sell Your Sponsorships

Sponsorships are a key revenue stream for any organization. From the sponsor’s perspective, they gain social capital within the community by supporting a charitable organization (and they get to market their business to a big group of people at the same time). From your perspective, your organization gains respect because a business has backed you and your mission (and you gain revenue as well).

We recommend offering multiple sponsorship levels so that each business can find an entry point that suits their budget and goals. Auctria makes it easy to provide distinct value that groups can offer sponsorships in return for financial payment.

Before the event launches, use Auctria to sell sponsorships. Set them up as For Sale items that sponsors can purchase directly on the website. Tracking and collecting payment for your sponsorships will be a breeze!

Sponsors can then be listed on your auction event website in the form of a Sponsorship page or a Sponsorship banner. The banner can be affixed to the header or footer of the website for even greater visibility. The logo of the Sponsor can also be linked to their website for an even greater value-add.

With Auctria’s easy-to-use system, you can add a sponsorship to your website in just 30 seconds - which means you can spend more time and energy finding more sponsors or selling seats.

Sell Your Seats

Don’t let all the effort you put into planning a stellar event go to waste because you overlook the importance of focusing on selling seats! It might seem like common sense to make sure all your tickets are sold, but it’s easy to forget to make sure you fill all your vacant seats by the time the event rolls around.

You can find our full list of ticket-selling tips here, but here’s two of our biggest tips:

1. Choose a realistic ticket price. It can be challenging to balance making a profit on your tickets with making sure your guests don’t feel overcharged, but it’s key to selling all of your tickets successfully (and ensuring guests return year after year!). Your prices should cover the hard cost of each attendee plus a bit extra so that your event pulls in revenue for your organization. Just make sure the ticket price matches the level of the event: if it’s a casual event, ticket prices should be lower than a black-tie gala - and if it’s a black-tie gala, guests will expect and be willing to pay a higher ticket price for the experience.

2. Make your event irresistible. You want attendees to return year after year, continuing to support your organization and its mission. The best way to do that is to provide a unique experience so that they aren’t bored after attending multiple times! Adding themes that change each year can be a great way to keep things fresh. Another option is to rotate through a main big-ticket auction item that becomes the focus of each year’s event: Mission First’s wide range of risk-free travel packages make a stellar focal point for an auction. You could even theme your event around each travel package, from beach trips to animal adventures and more! Planning a travel package yourself would be a huge undertaking to do well, but having a partner like Mission First makes it easy to take your event to the next level.

When it comes to the actual nitty-gritty of tracking seat sales, collecting payments, and more, Auctria has everything you need to sell seats smoothly. Don’t drive yourself crazy trying to manage all the details - let Auctria simplify the process so you can focus on the bigger picture, including streamlining the donor experience overall.

Streamline the Donor Experience

One of the best big picture tasks you can focus on while planning your event is how to streamline the donor experience. Whether it’s making it easy for a business to become a sponsor or seamlessly walking a potential attendee through purchasing a ticket and placing bids during the auction, ensuring a smooth experience is key to taking your event success to the next level.

If there’s friction in the experience (i.e. it’s hard to find where to buy a ticket, some payment options aren’t accepted, etc), then you run the risk of donors getting frustrated - they might even give up on attending, bidding, or donating entirely if it’s unclear or too difficult! You may also lose their trust: if your event is poorly run, they may not trust that your organization will put their donations to good work.

Of course, this means you need to have the time to think about what the donor experience looks like at every step of the process! And you can’t do that if you’re too caught up in a million other details. Finding partners you can trust will allow you to step back and benefit from their expertise so you can focus on improving the overall experience of your event in order to maximize donor satisfaction, fundraising revenue, and more.

We’ve laid out a few ways Auctria and Mission First make stellar partners that can take work off your plate and make planning and running your event easier and more efficient. However, we’ve only just scratched the surface of how these partners can take your event to the next level! Make sure to check out our websites and the other blog posts linked in this article for even more insights.

We hope to hear from you soon so we can help your event achieve its full potential!

Special thanks to Laurie Hochman from Auctria for the expert advice.

Auctria is a powerful engine to organize and run your event and auction fundraiser. From in person events to online and from the first donation to the final collection, Auctria helps you stay on top of the details so you can focus on maximizing your fundraising. Over 55,000 event fundraisers have used Auctria to raise over one-billion dollars.