At Web2ition, we are always looking for additional ways to serve the Sportzine Publishers, athletes and booster clubs in our markets. 

We are very excited to announce GR8auctions, online auctions to increase Sportzine Pubisher revenue and community fundraising impact throughout the year.  And booster clubs of any size and from any sports, music or arts club can participate.

Many booster clubs hold annual live auctions.  They require about 6 months of very hard work to run, are a ton of work requiring lots of committees and volunteers, require an event site such as a hotel or banquet room and an auctioneer, plus you have to come up with deposits and pre-auction expenses.  Marketing is very expensive including printing for flyers and an auction catalog.  Auction night requires lots of volunteers to run the door, the floor, seating, silent auction, live auction and cashiering.

Online auctions are significantly less work and can be just as rewarding or even more so since the booster club spends all their time just securing donations.  However, most booster clubs do not have web designers, appropriate club web sites and established web traffic to make an online auction effective or feasible.

GR8auctions enable any sports, music or arts club, of any size, to take advantage of an online auction with no up front expense, no marketing, no admin and no risk.  They just sign up and go into the community to get donation items to auction.  GR8auctions will be held quarterly or possibly semi-annually in smaller markets.  GR8auctions can be held the last week or each month, three times a year, or on a continious basis. 

GR8auctions allow bidders to search by item category across all booster clubs and merchants or to view the catalog for a specific booster club.  Booster Clubs manaage their own auction inventory.  Bidders manage their own account, place bids and track the bidding, place items on a watch list, even get email notices if their bid is outbid.  The GR8auctions technology is easy to learn and use.

Booster clubs sign up to participate in an auction and their only two responsibilities are to call on local merchants to get donations and to promote the auction through the student body and local community.  If your market is an entry level market with only 30 or so high schools, you want at least 10 booster clubs to participate.  The more the better.  If each booster club has an $8,000 fundraising target, then your auction would raise $80,000, netting $72,000 to the booster clubs.  If your market has 50 or 75 or more high schools, as you enter your second year of auctions, you might get the participation rate to 50% or more, then your auctions could raise $200,000 each netting $180,000!  In major markets, the GR8auctions could raise over $1 million dollars for local sports, music and the arts each year.

Through GR8auctions, booster clubs from high schools, youth organizations and even music and the arts can all participate in the largest online auction in your market.  It just takes 1% of local businesses to contribute auction items with an average value of only $50 to meet the typical fundraising objectives, Through the daily traffic generated by the Sportzine’s regular features and marketing through the booster clubs, Sportzine Publishers can do what no single booster club could do on their own.

Booster clubs never pay money upfront to participate in a GR8auction.  They just sign up during the registration period and begin collecting items.  The local Sportzine Publisher takes care of all the marketing, advertising, credit card processing, auction settlement and collections, technology and logistics.  Participating booster clubs net 90% of the proceeds for their sold items.

GR8auctions establishes an account for each booster club and they can list as many items as they wish.  They can add or delete their own items including photos.  Items can have minimum bids and reserves.  GR8auctions will report auction results by booster club immediately after the auction closes and pay out the proceeds within a few days.

Booster clubs should seek out items with an average value of at least $50, however all donations add up.  Merchants offering large ticket items such as a vacation, a hot tub or a quality piece of art may have hard costs they need to recover or might not be able to completely take a loss on the whole cost.  They can set a reserve amount required to cover a merchant’s real costs as long as it is still a great deal for the bidder and the net after the reserve is still meaningful as a fundraising item.

The key to a successful auction is bidders… and for an online auction they come from:  1) Natural traffic to the Sportzine who learn about the auction; 2) booster club promotion to the student body and in the community; 3) advertising; and, 4) promotion through participating merchants.

Web2ition will partner with a 501c3 non-profit to handle the transactions and distribute the money.  This will keep expenses low, provide for formal financial auditing, and complete auction transparency and integrity.

The Sportzine Market Analysis worksheets have been updated to include BoosterAuctions.

Watch for additional fundraising products and services coming later this year.