Clay Center for the Arts and Sciences of West Virginia, photo credit: Wanderbat

The Clay Center for the Arts and Sciences of West Virginia is a 240,000-square-foot facility dedicated to promoting performing arts, visual arts, and the sciences, and they have been using BiddingForGood for five years to help them raise more money and generate excitement for their fundraising auctions. However, online auctions weren’t always the easiest route for them to take.

Since their initial experiences with another company didn’t work out, they were reluctant to go back to online auctions – until the first year they started using BiddingForGood. According to The Clay Center’s Miranda Burr, in that first year, they were able meet their fundraising goals for the first time. “It generated a lot of information and excitement beforehand,” says Burr. “It also allowed us to be much more efficient, as credit card and other bidder information could be entered beforehand.”

But that wasn’t all – they were able to utilize additional features in order to push their auctions further than ever before. “Other things we do to make our auctions more successful include making sure the leaderboard is running and well displayed and using referrals from the website,” Burr offers. “We also look for items with no bids about an hour before the auction ends and drop the minimum bid price to try and generate some interest.”

There were also the added benefits that made their life easier, including the close out being “extremely easy” and the fact that being able to input bidder info beforehand “made the process much simpler and more efficient.” Organization and efficiency are the name of the game when it comes to BiddingForGood, and The Clay Center found that using the system helped take their fundraising to the next level.

If you’re a new auction chair who’s looking to run an event, Burr has some additional tips for you: “The quality of volunteers is very important. You need to have people that are approachable and able to socialize with guests well, checking if they have any questions. They also need to be able to identify problems with the event, so that they can be dealt with quickly and effectively.”

Looking for online fundraising auction solutions? Take a page out of The Clay Center’s book and check out BiddingForGood – it could be the missing piece to your auction success.

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