POG 10 - Austin Charity Auction

[truk4u]

The Rally Committee has come up with a suggestion to run by the members. There have been numerous comments from prior auctions about the length of time it takes to complete the auction and the result is people losing interest because of the time and late hour.

The thoughts are to break the auction up into 3 parts. A short auction after two evening meals and the final auction the night of the dinner cruise that will be announced on the upcoming Agenda.

So, your thoughts and/or suggestions regarding a single LONG auction or 3 shorter ones would be appreciated.

[bonhall41]

I agree that you lose a lot of people when it takes so long. Breaking it up might be a good idea as long as you have some interesting items each night. I still think that whoever does the auction needs to keep it moving or people won't hang around the second night. Do you know what the charity is for this year? Hope you raise a bunch of money.

[charlesebrownjr]

Three sounds good to me.

[garyde]

Here, for our school auctions, We always had a silent auction before dinner and the main auction. People would mingle, view and bid on items on the tables. Each table would have a closing time, and the closer to the time, people would keep coming back to check their bids to see if someone had upped the bid. This can be done before and during the dinner.
For the main auction, there would be about an hour worth of items of higher value.

[bonhall41]

I suggested that before. It's not difficult to do because you can have all the bidding sheets made up ahead of time and you just fill in the item description. Then you just gather up the sheets and total up what everyone owes. It also helps to have a master list of the item number and description so nothing gets lost in the shuffle. That can be done ahead of time also except for the description.

[Reagan Sirmons]

In concept, this sounds good but in reality, I would take exception and think that the ability to have three separate auctions, organized with the items, having them specifically displayed before hand, bookkeeping in place and settlement each night will be a difficult thing. That is a lot of planning and scheduling for everyone particularly when the group is like herding cats. In addition, the novelty of the auction and the momentum of the group might be somewhat lost. I am afraid that many will not participate due to their individual schedules of each evening.

I do know that I would recommend the auction items need better explanation if they are different than simply an object. Betty and I paid $1M for some trip last year and it turned out to be not what we thought and we are not even using it. We literally still don't know what it is.

My other thought which I have previously confidentially expressed is that from my view, the auction seemed to get out of hand last year and I would hope the items and presentations this year would be screened and presented keeping in mind this is being done in a family atmosphere type of environment. Just my thoughts.
Pres

[Pete]

Having watched several auctions over the past few years, and watching the accounting procedure get better last year (thanks to Tuga and Karen's efforts) we were able to have a complete tally of the auction within minutes after it was over. Tuga and Karen spent countless hours logging the items, entering them into the computer, after designing a really effective program with a very effective audit trail.

I am certain that POG would welcome more help in this effort, more than just suggestions, to actually help with with the laborious details needed to make our auction more successful starting with POG X.

While on the subject of the auction, I think not enough emphasis of saying "Thank You" was given the donors of items which made the last auction so profitable. So even though it is much later, I would like to say "Thank You" to the donors, (and some were substantial) which without them, there would have been NO AUCTION!