Kompolt's Five Keys to a Successful Online Charity Auction
1) Establish a Clear Direction
Before you start to plan an auction, determine what your top priorities are. Are you looking to drive brand awareness, create awareness of a new product or movie launch or generate as much money as possible? If you don’t establish your goals up front, you can’t really develop a plan. If you don’t have a plan, you are planning to fail.
2) Create a plan for driving traffic to your auction
The ability to reach out to millions of bidders is a major advantage of online auctions versus traditional live or silent auctions. You won’t capitalize on this, however, unless you make people aware of the opportunity.
Three common tactics employed to drive bidders to online charity auctions are:
| I) |  |
Media partnerships (e.g., enlisting a magazine or television show to get involved) |
| II) | celebrity involvement (e.g., persuading star supporters of a cause to donate items and generate publicity) | |
| III) | outreach to cause supporters. |
3) Manage your merchandise mix
Offering a high-profile item (a car, a celebrity’s clothing, etc.) is great, but in most cases, it makes sense to offer merchandise at low, mid and high-price levels. This enables a wider spectrum of consumers to participate.
4) You must have good customer service and bidder management
There is nothing more aggravating – and potentially damaging to sponsoring brands – than to discover that the highly publicized winning bid on your auction’s signature item was actually bogus. That is why Kompolt strongly recommends using bidder pre-qualification service on high profile and / or high revenue items.
To increase the chances of receiving high bids and those bids being good, it is important to make sure that all potential bidders receive excellent customer service. This builds bidder confidence that they will be treated fairly and that the item they are bidding on will be delivered as described.
5) Assemble a strong auction team
Depending on your resources and the level of publicity you expect to generate, your auction expertise could come from 1) an in-house expert, 2) an experienced, trusted trading assistant or 3) an auction management company like Kompolt.