Anatomy of an Auction:
How one college nets more than a quarter-million dollars annually from its auctionThe following article is reprinted by permission from with permission, from the November/December 1999 issue of Contributions. Subscriptions are available for $40/year by calling 508-359-0019 or by visiting the Contribution’s Web site at www.contributionsmagazine.com.
Special Event Spotlight
Interview with: Larry Zucker, Senior associate vice president,
university marketing & major eventsOrganization: California State University, Fullerton Name of Event: A Bid of Excitement Auction Date Held: May 6, 1999 Amount Raised: $668,000 gross / $284,604 net Please describe the event.
It’s a casual event, hosted annually by Robin Leach. It consists of a silent auction, a dinner, a live auction, and a premium silent auction.How many have you held in the past?
We’ve held eight in this format. It sells out annually with 800 people about two months in advance.How many have you been involved with?
I’ve done all eight here. And then we’ve done two spinoffs from this event, a game show version of an auction that Alex Trebec created with us from Jeopardy. And then I did one at my previous school, Cal State Bakersfield before I came here. So I guess I’ve done 11 auctions but I’ve also consulted at probably 25 schools across the country helping them create auctions.How much are ticket prices?
Ticket prices for 1999 were $50, for 2000 it’s going up to $75.Tell me all the ways in which you raise money with the event.
Well, I can tell you the breakdown of the income: the silent auction is the largest with $301,620. The next largest income source is the live auction which brought in $176,660. The premium silent auction was $119,283. The remaining $70,000 is miscellaneous, between gate, cash donations, and such.What is the premium silent auction?
The premium silent was something we added this past year. There were 15 items in the lobby with set prices instead of bidding. Most of them were vacation trips. That worked extremely well for us. For example, we sold 15 trips to Mexico using that system, as it allowed us to sell multiples on many of the different items.Did you raise more money this year than you did last year?
The net was about the same, the gross was higher.What are the expenses for this event?
We’re unusual from other nonprofits that do large events. In our auctions we have contracts with many international travel hotels and airlines. So we have higher expenses because we’re buying a lot of items which we didn’t when we started the event. But as it’s grown, we’ve had the ability to enter into volume sales contracts with cruise lines and hotel chains. So that when we sell the 15 cruises, we’re paying really good prices and making a net profit. That certainly puts us in a different category in terms of spending more money but as long as the net profit continues to go up, that’s what we’re looking to do.Give me some examples of donated prizes.
Well, we had travel to 105 countries in our auction this past year and almost all of the hotels in all of those countries donated. Once it’s donated, we might negotiate with them and attempt to secure second or third trips or hotel stays.Please describe the planning process. How many staff and volunteers are involved?
We don’t use volunteers for this event. It’s a staff-driven event. We use volunteers that evening because we have over a thousand silent auction items. We also use a credit union with about 80 people to do the different cashiering aspects. But as far as the logistics of the event, it’s all run by staff. We do all the solicitation of items and we don’t use committees for any of that. For this event, there is no committee, which again is unusual.How many staff involved?
There are about five full-time and one-half-time who work on this and other events as well.What’s the most labor-intensive part of this event?
Certainly the research to determine who to send proposals to. We send over 5000 proposals a year soliciting items for this event. And then the typesetting is a big job because we do full disclosure on every item. So in the program or on the bid sheets, it lists every blackout date, every restriction so that people know 100 percent what they’re bidding on.Were there any unexpected glitches this year?
The only unexpected glitch was for the first time we didn’t have an actual celebrity there. Robin Leach had a conflict in Antigua. Our auctioneer is John Moschitta who is the fastest talking guy in the world from the Federal Express commercials. We only knew a week before that Robin Leach couldn’t come, so we didn’t bring in a replacement celebrity since the event was already sold out.Is there anything you will do to improve the event, make it run more smoothly or raise more money next year?
Other than improving our barcoding system, which will help speed up cashiering, that, we’ll just continue to get better international items. We focus on international travel, although we have everything from laser eye surgery to orthodonture to fantasy packages. We have walk-on roles in movies and TV shows. We also offered the chance to name a character in best-selling authors’ books from Stewart Woods to Jeffrey Archer to Robert Ludlum. We had dinner with Robin Leach in his home in the Caribbean and lunch with Dick Vitale, the college basketball announcer in Florida. Next year we’re going to have dinner with Walter Cronkite in New York. So we do a lot of fantasy type items too.What’s the actual evening like for you once it comes around?
It’s kind of fund once it comes around, although I’m on a cordless headset in the back of the room the whole night calling the shots.What’s the most rewarding aspect for you?
Probably seeing the event growing, seeing the people come back year in and year out, getting to know them and seeing the progress in their lives. We started out booking people’s honeymoons and then we see them later bringing their kids to the event. We have many extended families that will have two or three tables with all their aunts and uncles. Andy they will annually buy their vacations from us. So it’s really turned into an intimate event where three-quarters of the people have no affiliation with the university other than the event. That’s another unusual component of the event.What advice would you give a colleague wanting to run a similar event?
To understand the intense labor and logistics required to do an event like this well. If you are not going to just live and breathe it, it’s not going to be successful. Auctions have a nice upside but they also have the largest potential for severe errors and problems of any event. We do another event that’s even bigger than the action, called Front and Center with major talent and no auction component. That event is much more turnkey. There isn’t nearly as much logistical work. It raised $748,000 in gross income. But the difference between the events is once that event is over, people had a great time and there’s no follow-up. With an auction, we deal with people for years after because sometimes an item doesn’t have an expiration date. And anytime they have problems booking their trip, for example, we deal with them on those challenges. The event just doesn't end that night.How is the money you raised spent?
Well it’s distributed throughout the campus so each area spends it differently. A lot of it is spend on scholarship and some of its is spent just on operating budgets. We use some of it to build the staff - we put a lot of it back into the event to keep it growing.Return To: Fundraising