Setting up a SIlent Auction for an event

Christina Harrill

Does anyone know the best way to set up an auction within RE without purchasing any additional software?

 

shani traum

For our silent auction, we track the GIK as a gift on a donor's record.  We have several attributes on the gift:

Gift Description

Gift Value

Buyer/Winner

Buyer/Winner winning bid


Before the auction items 1 and 2 are entered.


After the auction 3 & 4 are populated.


The gifts are all coded with funds and appeals that designate it as a GIK given for a particular event, so pulling the data is simple.

Fund: Casino GIK

Appeal: 2016 Casino Personal Appeal

Gift Type: GIK


Our bids are received at the event itself, so we're only entering that winning bid/name once.  But I guess if we were taking bids ahead of time, that field could be updated as higher bids come in.  Or the attribute could be entered multiple times to track the history of the bids.


Hope that's helpful.


Shani

 

Art Bryman 2

I agree with Shani's suggestions, but want to add the following:

1. GIK Donations:
   1. The GIK donations should have their own appeal, as before.
   2. On each gift, enter the item name as a package for that appeal
2. Auction Winners
   1. Create a separate appeal to track auction winners and their payments
   2. Copy the package list from the GIK appeal to this appeal.
   3. Enter the winning bid as a cash gift, with the auction winner appeal and item package.
   4. Set the receipt value to bid amount less the gift's value, if you want to print the tax deductible amount (see below)

Another option would be to use the same appeal for both donor and winner, and use the same package.  Then, you can run a report based on package, and you'll see the item donor as a GIK gift, while the winner will have a cash gift.

IRS states the following:

Donors who purchase items at a charity auction may claim a charitable contribution deduction for the excess of the purchase price paid for an item over its fair market value.  The donor must be able to show, however, that he or she knew that the value of the item was less than the amount paid.  For example, a charity may publish a catalog, given to each person who attends an auction, providing a good faith estimate of items that will be available for bidding.  Assuming the donor has no reason to doubt the accuracy of the published estimate, if he or she pays more than the published value, the difference between the amount paid and the published value may constitute a charitable contribution deduction.

shani traum

We do #2 as well, but I like the idea of the "prize" being a package.  Makes reporting that much easier.  I'll have to mention that to the rest of my ops team.


Thanks!!


Shani

Gracie Schild

Hi - our auction is set up a little differently from the other responses.  First, the fund is (for example) Gala 16, and all gifts are assigned to that fund.  The appeal is the "sort" mechanism.  We have the following appeals: Sponsorship, Donations, Tickets, GinKs, Art Sales, and Paddle Call.  Since we're an art institute and our alumni donate much of the art for the auction, they're already in the system. Table or general sponsorship goes in the one appeal (table sponsorship value minus (8 seats x FMV of dinner "benefit") = Receipt Amount), ticket sales under another (same claculation), "sorry, can't attend but here's a donation" under Donations, Paddle Call just like donations, and then come the GinKs and their sales.


Before my time, GinKs were a fund as well as a gift type, and it caused endless confusion.  We now direct the GinK to whichever fund or department fund number it is intended to benefit - which means Fund = Gala 16, Appeal = Gala 16 GinKs.  We used to laboriously enter all the GinK details on a spreadsheet after entering and acknowledging the gift through RE, but this year, I've put an end to that!  We automatically enter a gift attribute of "GinK Sold", with the date of our Gala and a value of $0 when the gift is entered in batch.  After the sale, we enter the dollar amount of the sale and the name of the purchaser.  We will now also have a Gala Item Number attribute which will indicate which part of the auction (Silent, Small Works Sale, Live) the piece will be ini under Description , and the item number in Comment (which will include the category - Jewelry, 2D, 3D, Experience, Other),  To list the Indian Market or IFAM booth numbers of our donors and/or their gallery representation, I created phone types under "Other" of "Gallery Representaion" and "IM/IFAM Booth #". We already converted "Religion" to "Tribal Affiliation", and we use the gift reference as the description of the donated item.  I will also create a gift attribute of "Artist name if not donor", so that when a collector donates the art of someone else, we can show both on our item labels.  Now all I have to do is create a Query that will spit all that into a form that we can run at will and work from as an Excel spreadsheet!  All the information that we need for our program, our sponsorship lists, our working lists for auction pieces, etc., can now be kept in RE and exported when needed, and only need to be updated in one place.  We generally don't do pledges for auction items, but we may do so to have a call list for keeping after them!


The GinK Sold attribute is filled in after the event.  With the item numbers to work with, we can enter all the purchases onto the purchaser's records, set them all to $0 receipt amount (since they got the art, they don't get the deduction!), and then review for the few that sold for more than the stated value to adjust the receipt amount. The fastest way to do that is to get the "sold amount" onto the GinK donation, then run a list showing value and sale amount.  We only have about 120-150 items in our entire event, so it's not too hard (and some don't sell at all).  We're also planning to go with mobile bidding this year, so we might be changing things up, but I'm determined to keep everything in RE instead of gifts in RE and EVERYTHING else on a multi page spreadsheet. Since we had discrepancies between the two last year that made intermediate reporting a challenge, we want to have one list only.  My only problem now is how to record table guests of sponsors, most of whom are NOT in our system.  I don't want to muddy the waters with a million relationship records. I will probably still do that on a spreadsheet into which I can merge ticket sales - we usually have to do lots of fiddling in Excel anyway to get the seating done. Alternatively, I could add a Note, but that wouldn't be very useful for exporting. We, too, do not want to buy extra software!


The only thing I don't like about everything related to the Gala being in one fund is that you can't record expenses on a fund record, only an appeal.  We have toyed with the idea of putting them all on the Sponsorship appeal, the appeal with the largest value of gifts until the event itself.  Currently, we track all those in QuickBooks as expenses against the gala revenue, which is booked separately from all other revenue. We will probably stick with this, since these "appeals" aren't in line with the Year End Appeal and similar.


I hope that has given you some ideas - it's the flexibility of RE that I love, and I'm always finding new ways to make my life easier using it.


 

Faith Murray

Our process is not nearly so complicated as others'. As auction items gifts are received, we post them as Gift-in-Kinds, with a dollar value $0.00, to the appeal/fund they benefit (2015 Dinner Event, 5K Walkathon, etc.), but we add a "Fair Market Value" attribute to track the approximate value of the gift. The item donated is tracked in the gift reference, though you could also use a gift attribute if your items tend to repeat from year to year. With a gift value of $0, we can filter these from financial reports using the "Exclude $0 gifts" option in Reports, so we see no need to give GIKs their own separate appeal.


When gifts are sold, we do not track the buyer info in RE, because we only post donations in RE, and auction items are goods received and therefore not tax-deductible. However, we did recently adopt the policy for adding auction buyers into the database for future cultivation, and they will receive an Attribute marking them as an auction buyer. We don't really care that they bought a set of silent auction doilies for Aunt Tildy, and we prefer not to double-count gifts by tracking donated value and purchased value both in our accounting.