Elementary School Auction-

Hi A.,

I can donate a Silpada gift certificate to the auction. Please let me know where to send it to. What school is this for?

Thanks,
C.
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Have a theme auction???? Like a fash bash for clothes, an entertainment theme for like videos/DVDs, collectors for collectibles. Jazz it up some.

My friend has been in your shoes for a long while, and she has had some great success doing a silent auction of themed gift baskets. She has each classroom create a basket, and they get to select their theme. That way, the students are getting involved, and each teacher can ask their parents to send in donations to help fill their classroom's basket! Her responsibility is then to collect each basket and fillings and 'prepare them' for the auction. I think they might even set it up as a contest to see which class ends up bringing in the most $$ for their basket - gives them more incentive to fill it with good stuff! They end up with a great assortment of gift baskets with fabulous stuffings, and the bidding has gotten great results on them! I've seen movie night theme, game night theme, spa/pampering theme, a gift card theme (full of tons of various gift cards), and so much more! Good Luck.

Hi A.,
At my daughters school they do a silent auction every year at family fun night. What they do is pick a theam for every classroom, (outdoors, candy, ect) and then ask each child to donate something related to this and also if parents would like to donate another basket that's fine too. Then they make them baskets and wrape them up and parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, everyone can bid on them at family fun night. This year they raised over 3,000. doing this. It's also fun for the kids as well. We are in a small town and local flower shops helped with the baskets and stuff. You'd be surprised at who will help if you just ask. Good Luck.

We did movie buckets and everyone loved them, we asked parents to donate popcorn, candies, movie rental gift certificates or gently used family friendly movies and then had everyone bid on the buckets.

A., my wife is a teacher so I have been to several school auctions.

The first her school rented out and had catered dinner at a nice faculity and had their auction there.... they barely broke even.

The second, they had at the school and all the students were invited to come as well. They had pretty simple food that had to be purchased in the cafeteria (hot dogs etc). In a few of the other rooms is were they had the things up for auction. This way the kids were telling the parents what they wanted to have.

Both times they had sheets of paper in front of the items that people could write their bids on. That way they could see the previous highest bid and then increase the amount.

My wife's school had alot of parents donate things. One parent did horse riding lessons.. so that something that she was able to donate. I would put out a school email to the teachers to find out if the parents do anything interesting that might make a good donation. OH, a few of the teachers put "you and 3 friends to go to the movies with place "teachers name here" (they would take 2 teachers in the same grade and go together)

anyways, just a couple of thoughts

Dr. Rick Semlow
6780 Rochester Rd
Troy, MI
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Hi A.?
This is my first time on mammasource. I was wondering if you would like a donation for your auction? I can offer you a
$50 gift basket from my Mary Kay Business. You can respond
via my e mail ____@____.com

Hi A..
I can't speak to live auctions, but I'm on my son's school's Parent Guild and we just ran a successful silent auction. We set up the items in the hallway during conferences(ours run for 2 days)for maximum exposure. We had each classroom do a special project. We left out sheets for parents to bid and we got $250 for just one of the items! We put an end time to coincide with the end of conferences and we even had parents coming back to check on their bids the second day. Since it sounds like you do a lot of the work yourself, this might help, because it required minimal time on the part of the board. Good luck!

Hi~
I dont know if you can use it, but at our church we always have a service auction to raise funds for mission trips. It has proven to be a very good idea!! Any service will do, but the big sellers are babysitting, manual labor, seasonal cookies, desserts...sometimes we can even get local business to donate a service to be auctioned such as a massage or facial.

Good luck!
~L.

We had a very successful baked good auction one year. It was amazing to see Grandma buy 6 cupcakes her Grandson made for $25. It was also very fun, because everyone tried to out do the other and then we had those made by the kids. Quite the variety. Also auctioning off a weekend get away always is a big item at our auctions. Businesses in the area will donate items as well.

Hi-I am going to bring this idea to my daughter's school PTO soon, so I thought I'd share it with you. My no-hassle fundraiser idea revolves around eBay.

My scenario proposal would be something like this:

I am the eBay seller (meaning I have an established eBay account and am familiar with the ins/outs of selling via online auction). Each month, we pick two classrooms in the school to be our "auction item" rooms. We ask each family in these two classrooms to look around their homes and see if they can find ONE interesting, sellable, quirky, fun, WHATEVER type of item that they would donate to the school. Realizing that not each family would participate, you would still be able to get MANY items to auction. Some large...some small. At any rate, 100% of the profits would go to the schools (once the eBay fees are taken out--which are small--around 2%).

I'm working on this as we speak. I think it would be a VERY easy and effective fund raiser! Definitely worth a trial run.