46 Silent Auction Ideas to Boost Revenue and Make Your Gala FUN
The 2-Question Test to Determine If an Item Is Worth Procuring
The more silent auction ideas you have to work with, the easier it will be to procure enough winners to ensure a successful auction without taking too much of your time to plan.
When it comes to silent auctions, it’s all about the desirability of the items. Cost matters less than appeal. I’ve seen expensive silent auction items like pianos and family portrait sessions sell like hotcakes. And at the very same auctions, some items valued at just $20 don’t even receive a bid. Usually, this boils down to a simple pair of questions:
1) Who would want this?
2) Are there enough of these people to justify procuring this item?
For example, who would want a collector’s set of pitchforks from the 1800s?
Certainly, there are people out there who would be fascinated by such a collection and would enthusiastically bid on it in a silent auction. But – how many of these people are there? Probably not too many. This is why paintings and photographs can be tough sells. Art is so subjective; it’s usually large, and it feels so permanent. It has to fit somewhere. The colors have to match. I’m not saying don’t offer visual artwork, but it should not dominate your silent auction.
You need items to be desirable by enough people that you have a strong chance of selling them for good value.
With that in mind, flood your next auction planning meeting with the following treasure trove of silent auction ideas, and see how many of them your team can procure.
Silent Auction Ideas
Silent auctions are so much fun, in part because everyone can ‘play.’ They offer a lower cost opportunity than the live auction for more people to get involved and try to win something.
So keep that in mind when procuring items. Yes, you want to maximize revenue. But you also want people to enjoy your event so they keep coming back. Look to have a variety of items with different valuations and diverse audience appeal.
Gift Baskets
Image by Sadival Cestas y Lotes from Pixabay
Gift baskets have the distinct advantage of being more difficult to determine if it’s a “good deal.” With a basket, you’re selling an experience, not just a collection of items.
You might offer a grill basket, for example, with lighter fluid, brushes, gift cards at a butcher shop, skewers, and other items. No one is going to stand there on their phone trying to look up the values of all these items. The collection itself has inherent curb appeal, simply by the fact that it’s packaged (attractively) all in one place.
In the business world, we call this ‘bundling.’ It’s harder to assess the value of a bundle of items than when they’re listed a la carte.
Other gift basket themes you could package up include:
- – auto
- – golf
- – beach
- – spa and personal care
- – movies
- – holiday items (whatever holiday comes after your auction)
- – camping
- – children’s toys
- – back to school
- – coffee
- – tea
- – chocolate
- – books
Bonus tip: Make sure and list all the items inside the basket on your silent auction item description sheet.
Food and Wine
Image by Christoph Schütz from Pixabay
Wine tours often get placed in the live auction. But maybe your procurement team had a little more success in this area than you anticipated. If you end up with too many wine tours, put the lower priced ones in the silent auction.
Beyond just gift cards (which also make terrific silent auction items if you don’t have enough for a gift card wall – see 8 more silent auction strategies here), you can sell experiences like cooking classes, cheese-making tours, and brewery tours.
Food delivery businesses have also sprung up online in recent years, and they’re hungry for new customers to try out their services. Get one to donate a couple of free delivery or grocery shopping services.
For a more earth-friendly option, offer a U-pick experience at a local farm.
Local Travel Experiences
Depending on your location, your options here will vary. But people love experiences.
Train rides, animal sanctuaries, private plane rides, one-day boat cruises, cabins, hideaways – people love these sorts of things. And again, these have an inherent value that’s hard to put a number on.
You’re unlikely to auction off a gift card for much more than its value. But an experience – the bids can far exceed even what the actual business may charge for the same experience.
Family Fun Experiences
Image by Eduardo Davad from Pixabay
Along the same lines, look for experiences that connect with your family audience. This again could include train rides and perhaps the other experiences listed above.
But this also includes:
- – Local theme parks
- – Children’s theater – indoors and outdoors
- – Sports leagues
- – Skills training like karate, or canoe carving
- – Magicians
- – Free childcare or babysitting (a guaranteed sell!) from a board member or volunteer
- – Swimming
- – Paintball
Technology
Some online subscriptions can work great as silent auction ideas. And because technology itself appeals to a large enough segment of most audiences, you can straight up sell items like cameras, tablets, iPads, game consoles, and similar items.
However, because they usually have higher value and broader appeal, these sorts of technology items can often draw far more revenue if you use them as raffle items or prizes for fundraising auction games like Heads or Tails and the Thin Green Line.
Cross-Cultural Experiences
Passes to local museums are a great way to expose people to new cultures and ideas. Depending on the organizations in your area, you may also be able to procure a tour or a special presentation.
Bonus points (and higher revenue) if you can relate this to your mission in some way. In that case, it might be enough to justify placing it in the live auction instead.
Mission-Related Silent Auction Items
Finally, whatever your nonprofit’s mission, you can probably come up with some items that only your nonprofit could sell.
Bikeworks, a Seattle nonprofit, sells real bikes in their live auction made by youth in their program. But in their silent auction, they sold many other bike-specific items and tours that wouldn’t make sense for just about any other nonprofit.
What about you? Put a lot of thought into this one, because like experiences, mission-related silent auction items have indeterminate worth and more meaning than anything else on this list. That means you can charge more for them.
Want More Silent Auction Ideas?
As helpful as this list hopefully was, there’s even more at Winspire’s Ultimate List of silent auction ideas.
If this list has still left you wanting more, feel free to poke around theirs.
But, remember the core elements of silent auction success:
- Variety is king – variety of items, prices, audience appeal
- Don’t have too few items – give enough people a real chance at winning
- Don’t have too many items – don’t dilute your guests’ buying power
- Revenue matters, but the experience of your guests does too
- Presentation matters – decorate well
- Be crystal clear on your silent auction item description and bid sheets
- Space out your bid increments enough to make money, but not so much that you suppress bidding wars
- Start low, but not too low (25-35% of market value)
- For more, see 8 silent auction strategies here
Good luck at your next silent auction, and have fun – you and your guests!
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