How can an online auction help me engage current donors AND attract new donors?

An online auction is a new and innovative way to engage your donors, sponsors, members and participants in order to help them feel a strong sense of affinity with your organization. For example, when we asked our customers 73% said they engaged more of their constituents and 60% involved more bidders, when compared to traditional fundraising events.

Our powerful online auction products also provide easy ways to attract new donors: the refer-a-friend and guestbook features let your bidders bring new participants to your event - and potential donors to your organization.

How can I get more bidders and increase bidding activity?

Adding an online auction to a live event lets you reach out and engage all of those donors who will not attend the live event. This means more bidders, which means more bidding and more money raised at your auction. Over half of our customers add an online component to their existing live event, saving time, reducing the difficulty and raising more money by putting their silent auction items online - and auctioning them off to non-event attendees in advance of the live event. You'll expand the reach of your auction to those who cannot attend the live event - and who want to support your cause.

How can I add value for potential sponsors?

We also asked our customers how online auction compared to traditional fundraising events in terms of the value to their event sponsors, and 20% said they secured more sponsors.

That's because all of OurAuction products offer multiple sponsor slots for clickable links and logos that provide measurable marketing value and web site traffic to your generous sponsors. You can “build the case” for your sponsors based on the number of email addresses you have, and the number emails you plan to spend. In today's competitive market place, such quantifiable lead flow is worth a lot to a business - and we've seen our customers capture thousands of dollars in sponsorship fees for these promotional slots. So whether you are talking to a sponsor for the event or a specific catalog item, you can demonstrate the marketing exposure they will realize through their sponsorship.

How can get popular and profitable items for my event?

We have a number of ways to easily procure exciting, profitable catalog items, including:

• cMarket Place, our catalog development service, is the one-stop shop for over 450 items proven to raise money and encourage bidding at all types of fundraising events. An analysis of our completed auctions indicates that auctions with cMarket Place items enjoy a 25% increase in net contributions.
• The “Donate an Item” feature in the auction product allows you to ask your entire constituent base to contribute items. And because the item donor enters all the details on the items, it saves you time in building the online catalog. We've had a number of customers get a large percentage of their catalog items this way, for example Cancer Community Center at 10% of total catalog and FEW at 100%.

How can I promote my events?

Our online promotional capability, combined with proven promotional email messages, lets you effectively put your auction into the email boxes of all of your constituents. And email works: on average, our customers enjoy an email open rate of 11%, with some auctions experiencing open rates as high as 18%!

How will an online auction help improve my fundraising results?

nonprofit organizations chose cMarket for a variety of reasons - to raise more money, get their fundraising online, strengthen their relationships with their communities and motivate new donors to give. With all of these reasons, over 75% of cMarket customer recently surveyed answered “yes” to the question of whether they would run another auction with cMarket.