Fundraising is always something big for a school, especially when clubs and societies are looking for funding. A fundraising auction is an excellent way to do just that: make money.

Now school auction projects don’t sound like big-money events, but it all depends on how it’s done. If you know what you’re doing, it sure isn’t impossible for you to rake in $10,000 to $20,000 in one fell swoop. Your child’s club will never have problems with funding as long as you know how to raise money with a school auction:

Planning: Making or Breaking the Auction

Treat a school auction like it’s a business and it’ll be like one. How you plan carefully can turn a school auction into a mere one-time yard sale or an annual money-making event of for your school.

Elements of the planning stage include mining your group for resources and items to auction off, matching items to the audience, acquiring software and hardware for the event. And you have to begin planning for all these factors nearly a year in advance for the auction: treat it like a major event, with all the courtesies and formalities that come with it and you’re going to get one.

Finding the Items to Sell

Creativity is the name of the game here. Although you’ve got the option of asking parents to donate items to set up for auction, you may want to think up alternative options that match the resources available to you.

For example: if you’ve got a parent who owns a luxury yacht, why not auction up a romantic boat ride for two? Or if you’ve got a donator who specializes in furniture making, why not have an auction for a top-notch, hand-built dresser made of fine wood?

Check the people around you, and you’ll be surprised at the options you’ll have to offer in school auction projects.

Matching Items to the Audience

It will be impossible to sell a $10,000 item in a crowd that has only a few hundred dollars in their pockets. Thus, it is essential that your school auction committee be able to assess the financial capabilities of the attending participants.

Carefully study the population of participants that will be attending the auction and divide them into categories: low, mid and high. Make sure low-spenders will be guided to the affordable section of the auctions, while those with more clink in their pockets would be guided to the higher-cost section of the auctions. Do this, and you won’t worry about having the wrong audience for the right auction.

The Art of Auctioneering

Any good auction has to have skilled auctioneers manning it. You don’t want an auctioneer who can’t speak to save his life, and you don’t want an auctioneer who doesn’t have a clue about auctions. You’ll need an auctioneer who knows how to rouse the interest of the crowd; to timely kick in humor and wit in order to keep the crowd entertained, and to inject a certain environment of desire and competitiveness within them.

Plan ahead, be creative, do the proper matching and find a good auctioneer to man the helm. Do it properly, and your fundraising auction will rake in the dollars like no tomorrow.

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How to Raise Money with a School Auction

Technorati Tags: Auction, Fundraising, fundraising auction, school auction

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Please help me name the room I won?

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Mock Slave Auction At Ohio Elementary School!!!!

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Does anyone know any companies who would donate prizes for charity auction?

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Learn about our fundraising auctions and how we’ve helped over 6,000 customers raise more than $125 million through charitable commerce.

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Fundraising Auctions for Schools & Nonprofits | BiddingForGood

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Brooklyn – PS 9 Silent Auction – GETTIN’ DOWN!

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The room mother wants me to remove my logo from the pictures and has asked for the raw images on a disc and give them to her so she can print them at Target.

I am also a parent of a child in the class, we did about 100 pictures with the children and class for a school auction. They are going to auction pictures of the children to parents for a profit and we were picked to do the pictures. We got no compensation as it was on a volunteer basis but removing the logo and handing over images without the logo or the name will negate all the work I did to help them make a lot of money off of my time and effort.

Is this customary when working with a school or classroom? I know Lifetouch puts logos on the school pictures. I feel because they are making a profit off of my work that I should at least have my logo on the work.

Should I refuse to hand over the pictures or try to keep negotiating for the logo? I don’t feel handing over the photos without any credit or mention is appropriate. They haven’t even offered a thank you.
Thank you BCNU. I am going to write that up about only limited copies of the photos. It is a small logo that has the name of my company in the corner that takes up maybe 1/2 an inch in a neutral color. It just says "RoxHart Art &Photography" I am a legitimate business. I have a television show locally and I have a model on Suicide Girls, and I do fashion shows. I have never had any issue with models like this and I feel the school is trying to jip me just because my son is a student in this class and if I was charging them for 8 hours of work at $150 an hour it’d be a lot of money and still I wouldn’t remove my copyright unless they paid or negotiated for that removal. I’ve never even had someone ask to remove the copyright or for the raw images on a disc or through email of all things. We did quality work on these pictures like we would for a paying client. They won’t even acknowledge our business they said it is considered a solicitation of business to even
The room parent is saying she is going to crop and cut my logo off of the pictures and then is trying to dog my work. I am just going to talk to the office in the morning and tell them they do not have permission to use the photos at all if this is whats happening.

They have a serious problem, if they don’t want to negotiate with the guy who holds all the cards…

You took the photos, you automatically own the copyright of each and every picture, you may mark them any way you deem suitable to help preserve your rights, including your copyright notice or signature.

They are asking for a free license and I can guarantee that they are planning to further duplicate and publish those pictures for their own purposes, without any further payment or acknowledgment to you.

It is absolutely NOT customary to attempt to deprive a volunteer professional of his or her right to have some recognition for their hard work. They cannot dictate how you must change YOUR photos to suit their arbitrary needs. Ask them how much it would have cost them to hire a contractor to do these photos, and the STILL would not have owned the copyrights of any of them.

You might remind them of this, when you hand the school administrator the contract form you want them to sign, in exchange for your work and delivery of the photos, giving them only a one-time, limited right to duplicate the unmodified pictures, with your copyright notice intact and visible on each photo, in sets of no more than three (or four or five) copies of each one, for the sole purpose of auctioning those sets (for the exclusive benefit of the school treasury) to family members of the child in the photo, for their own private viewing, not including any electronic distribution or publication by any means at any time without first obtaining the necessary PAID license from you. If they don’t sign the form, you don’t give them any pictures, let alone any "clean" copy on any digital medium (which is just begging to have them rip you off).

They may say, "you can’t change the terms after you already did the work". You say, "Neither can you. Show me which part of this license contradicts what you expected to get, and we’ll talk about it."

Because you were not paid, you can also simply decide to keep the photos in any case. If they want to "sue you", what are their damages?

If they’re smart, they will recognize that you have a right to obtain at least some recognition, if not free advertising, out of this deal at no charge to themselves.

Add: It is completely false that you do not "own" the pictures. You are not their "employee". Therefore, you are legally the "author" of the photos and the owner of the copyright. 17 USC § 201.

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Took pictures for the school with pro equipment for the school auction but they dont want to give me credit?

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Director James Hyatt also follows the progress of the record-setting auction price for Haley’s “Toric Knot” sculpture piece.

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Penland School of Crafts: Hoss Haley Sculpture and Auction 2010

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Auction School!

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All fundraising groups are going to have to sell their items to generate money. Everyone starts with selling to mom and dad then moves on to friends. The more successful the campaign means the more people you will actually have to talk to. Here are a collection of sales tips you can use to help you while you are raising funds.

- Have fun and enjoy what you are doing. It is not necessary to have a canned speech and perform it by memory. You can talk to people and have fun with your campaign, the donors will pick up on this and sales will increase.
- Be honest while making the rounds for sales. You are a representative of your school group.
- People do not want to be told what to do. Your job is to make people feel good about donating to your school group.
- When you get a no, don’t take it personally. The donors are not saying they don’t like you; they just may not care for the product or have the money available at the time.
- For people who are nervous about selling a little preparation is key. By practicing your sales talk it will bring confidence. Again the goal is not to recite something word for word but to talk about your fundraising campaign with confidence. It might sound a little funny but try role-playing if selling is an issue with you. Spend time with people rehearsing just talking and getting past an objection or two.
- Avoid hard selling. There is no need to be pushy while fundraising. People like to help out and also enjoy buying. You may even be able to offer them the chance to show up to school to check out the new equipment, or the new uniforms for the baseball team. By being friendly and a good representative you just might pick up new volunteers along the way.
- If possible get a booth or a table in a high traffic area. Places like malls or local events. This will get you lots of traffic and potential donors that you can approach.

These sales tips are good for whatever sales you might find yourself in. You might even consider these tips good advice for talking to people and relating. Remember interacting with people will serve you better than just about any learned skill taught. A little preparation with these tips will insure that your fundraising campaign is both fun and profitable.

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school prom fundraising ideas?

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