How to Run a Charity Art Auction That Actually Raises Money

Every autumn the same e-mail arrives. A school, a hospice, a local foundation: would you donate a work for our fundraising evening? Most artists say yes. And most of them never hear what it sold for.

We see both sides of that evening. Artists we work with give away paintings worth thousands, and the organisers — almost always volunteers who have never run an auction before — get a fraction of it because of things nobody warned them about. None of those things are hard. They are just not obvious the first time.

Here is what makes the difference, in the order you will need it.

Ask for fewer works, not more

The instinct is to fill the room: forty lots, a long table, something for everyone. It is the single most reliable way to raise less money.

An audience has roughly ninety minutes of attention. Split that over forty lots and each one gets two minutes, which is not enough time for anyone to fall in love with anything. Bidding stays polite and stops early. Split it over twelve lots and something else happens: people look properly, they decide what they want, and two of them decide they want the same thing.

Twelve good works will out-earn forty mixed ones, almost every time. It is also kinder to the artists who gave them — nobody wants their painting to be lot 31 of 40 at ten past ten.

Start the bidding at a third of the value, not at the value

This is the hardest advice to accept and the one that pays for itself. A painting valued at €1,200 that opens at €1,200 will get no bids at all. The room reads the silence as a verdict on the work, and once a lot has gone quiet it does not come back.

Open it at €400 and four people raise a hand. Now they are not deciding whether to buy — they are deciding whether to lose. That is a completely different feeling, and it is the feeling that carries a bid past what anyone planned to spend.

Tell the artist beforehand that this is what you are doing and why. Almost all of them understand it. What they cannot forgive is discovering it on the night.

Decide early: live, silent, or both

A live auction is one lot at a time with someone at the front. It creates the excitement, and it is where the big numbers come from. It also eats the evening, which is why twelve lots is the ceiling.

A silent auction runs alongside it: a table of smaller lots that people bid on whenever they like, closing at a set time. Nobody has to stand and watch. It is where you put the prints, the ceramics, the donated dinners.

The strongest evenings do both, and they used to be a nightmare to run — bid sheets that walk off, handwriting nobody can read, two people convinced they bid last. That part has genuinely changed. Everyone bids from their own phone now, so the sheets are gone and the screen at the front always shows the truth. We built a tool that runs exactly this after watching one too many evenings lose half an hour to a missing clipboard.

Say something about the work before you open it

Not the valuation. The story.

Who made it, where, what they were doing at the time, why they gave it to you. Thirty seconds is enough. A lot that has been introduced properly sells for noticeably more than the same lot announced as "lot seven, oil on canvas, we will start at four hundred."

Ask the artist for those three sentences when you ask for the work. They will write it themselves, and it will be better than anything you could write for them.

Let the people who could not come bid anyway

Every guest list has a group who wanted to be there and could not: a grandmother on the other side of the country, an alumnus who moved abroad, the parent on a night shift. In a paper auction they are simply lost.

They do not have to be. If the bidding is open on a link, they bid from the sofa on the same lots at the same moment as the room. Put a live video from the hall on the same page and they hear the auctioneer while they do it. For a school or a club with people scattered around the country, this is often the difference between a good evening and a very good one.

Settle it the same night

The evening ends, everyone is happy, and then nothing happens for three weeks while someone chases twelve people for bank transfers. Half the exhaustion of running a fundraiser lives in that fortnight.

It does not have to. If winners get a message with the amount and a payment link the moment the hammer falls, most of them pay before they have left the building. Whatever you use, decide how the money is collected before the night — not at eleven o'clock while people are putting their coats on.

Write to the artists on Monday

This is the step everyone skips, and it is the reason so many artists stop saying yes.

Tell them what their work sold for, who bought it if the buyer does not mind, and what the total came to. Two lines. An artist who gets that e-mail donates again next year and tells other artists to. An artist who hears nothing has quietly given away a painting, and learned something about how it is going to go.

If you are organising one

Almost everybody running a charity auction is doing it for the first time, and will do it once. That is a strange thing to have to be good at.

Everything above is written out step by step in the guide to running an auction evening — from setting the lots up to settling afterwards. And if you want to see how a bidding evening works before committing to anything, you can build the whole thing, print the codes and run a full rehearsal without paying: you only pay when you open the real bidding.

AuctionTool.ai is made by the same people as Online Gallery. It came out of exactly the evenings described above.

Photos: Online Gallery (GoFlo)