Electronically Signing Silent Auction Gift Certificate Made Easy

Electronically signing silent auction gift certificate

[Music] thank you for joining us for this webinar our goal is to help fundraising groups make the most out of their auction fundraiser this webinar is part of an ongoing series with exclusive content from Austria so be on the lookout for additional topics you do all the work for the auction fundraiser but are you feeling maximizing the event do you ever ask yourself for your team can we make more money with the same effort the answer is yes and we are answering some of those questions here today especially as it pertains to the Austria platform and just as a quick overview octroi was founded in 2011 as charity auction organizer we updated our name and logo to Austria in 2016 like many awesome tools this program was designed out indeed we too were tired of paper bed sheets unorganized tracking and long cumbersome checkouts there had to be a better way so since then twenty eight point six thousand auctions 3.3 million bidders one point eight million items have helped groups rave raise over a hundred and seventy million dollars and every day is still new and we're always appreciative of feedback and through the years the feedback has guided us in improving and adding additional features so we're always open to that so let's talk about big picture here for a silent auction I'm going to go big and then go small and we'll get into a little bit of the details so big picture here are some of the large pieces that make up the silent and live auction within your Auk drea platform and these images match the icons on the dashboard and within the platform to keep everything looking the same for when you go to set up your silent auction and live fundraiser so starting from the top you've got your organization you've got credit cards donors add your auction add your items tickets and tables your auction website your Austria license in includes ticket and table sales as well as management so here's the agenda like I said we're gonna start from Ground Zero setting up the organization and the auction event we'll go over the configuration adding the donors the items we'll talk about the tickets and the tables and the sponsors and then I just can't help myself even though it's setting up a silent and live auction I have to close the circle and touch base on closeout and check out and if this does war in its own webinar and it does have its own webinar and that is up on our website for playback but we'll touch on that too you can watch that one when it's convenient for you and where you when you're closer to that time in your plan so I want to just do a quick view of your dashboard these are the pretty boxes in the middle and the central part of the auction dashboard provides you with an overview of your auction one little tip I want to draw your attention to the yellow circle inside that you'll see a little plus sign and that plus sign indicates you can do a quick ad in those areas so there's two one for items and one for bidders but let's look look let's look at this a little higher up from a bird's eye view you get an entire view of your auction in terms of numbers you've got your number of items your number of bidders your total income and then you also have fingertip access to some of the most important setup features such as your online registration status whether it's enabled or turned off your auction website URL your credit card status if you had set up a texting phone number if that's in place it would be listed in your dashboard up in the pretty boxes also as well as your octree license so in area number two this is the item summary and this shows the quantity of items you can click on any blue text types to see the details and drill down even further section number three on the right is your income summary the income summary shows a breakdown of income sources and provides quick links to details as well here you'll see donor donations close bids and progress activity same thing anytime you see blue type you can click on that and drill down for further and if you've been hanging around Austria for any length of time you'll know that there's usually a few ways to accomplish the same task and this just allows for the user to find their own comfort zone so this is a visualization of the hierarchy of your octree organization license and if you're using locked area for multiple times you're planning on it this is a good way to to take a look at it the organization is at the top and the organization purchased and is the owner of the Austria license depending on your purchase depends on the number shows the number of events that you can run during a license here so bronze is two Silver's full or gold is eight the organization level details are mostly set up upon purchase however any time is a good time to review those details at the org level this is where you set up your logo your credit card connections social media and donors are at an org level then each event has its own items bidders and website and what's also cool is you can set up the admin level by event two if you have certain volunteers that are only working on certain events and you want to give them access that's limited by event only so the first order of business is to set up the organization like we just chatted about the organization is on the bottom of the nav bar on the left and then in the yellow box under the org this is where you can add an auction manage the users for the organization and see your license and a couple other housekeeping details so I've circled across the top and pink some pieces that I want to bring to your attention these are the details of the organization this is where you're going to set up the main email the BCC the organization's website and time zone for social media this is where you're going to connect your social media account details these will be used in the emails as well as on the website we've got options for Facebook Google Instagram LinkedIn Pinterest Twitter and an end youtube is on there too I'm going to state the obvious here but use only those that you keep updated nothing is worse than clicking a social media link and the most recent post is months or years old so honestly if you don't use it it's okay just don't link it the only icons that will show on the option website are those that are populated talk about the logo area you can upload a logo for the organization here or later you will also be able to add a logo at the auction level so some groups want to have a logo for each event and maybe include the calendar year and the event name it makes it distinguishable connections is referring to your email and your stripe okay so now from the left section of the auction in the middle of the screen you want to do add new auction that's an easy button to click and then add all the pertinent details you're going to need to be able to collect payments after the auction concludes so therefore setting up a credit card integration is required if you are doing online bidder registration or event ticket sales make sense if you want to charge somebody for something that they're purchasing you have to have some credit card integration there so using credit card processing an octree will allow you to connect your stripe account use some tests and live modes and the default is live you can use credit card readers you can charge processing fees you can define credit card processing preferences bidders can register their card if necessary you can issue refunds as well as view reports and then for stripe you can export some stripe data so to access the credit card functions click credit cards on the left hand menu and it really does walk you through the steps you notice I talked a lot about stripe Austria actually supports two credit card services you can streamline better registration with stripe or authorize.net and they're both industry leaders first stripe they do have some processing fees it's 30 cents per transaction and 2.9 percent and if you're a 501c3 they do have some discounted pricing for that so if that applies make sure you're receiving they're just discount authorized.net is a little different it's acting as a gateway to your existing merchant account and it essentially just allows Austria access to your to process fees for you and that's probably based on your current plan that is probably about twenty-five dollars a month based on usage and then a per transaction fee as well as a percentage so bottom lining it if you are not set up with a credit card vendor yet stripe is our suggested vendor if you already use and loved authorize.net and by all means connect and use them in each case no matter which the credit card numbers are saved securely with the payment processor not with off tria and only a token is saved with an Austria so each are completely integrated and give you the safety security and peace of mind you're looking for to run your event now the next step we've gotten the organization organized we've got the credit card or organized now we want to set up the auction event to do this we go to the auction section and click Add option see I'm telling you you guys can do this choose a name for the auction and an event date but don't worry the event date here doesn't have to be exact this just helps the system organize everything when you have multiple events after creating the auction you now want to add the details like an image just and just for this event any sort of user permissions user permissions can be set at the event as well as the oral use the permission that is right and matches the team member with the job that they will be fulfilling on octree a-- i'm going to plow right into items now austria tracks the items as well as other items that you may be selling other parts of the auction that can be managed through Austria are also managed as items are for sale items donations raffles and there's another little piece it's called partial if you get little bits and pieces and you run a wrap them together later in a basket you can load it as a partial and then roll them together like I said as a basket you can also do sponsorships online with Austria each item will have its own title description and photos as well as information about the donors so it's amazing how quickly auction items come in and how quickly the item list grows so let me introduce you to categories the purpose of the item categories is for you as an admin to better organize the experience for the bidder categories give you a nice structure to the auction catalog so items aren't just in there random and willy-nilly the quicker a bidder can find something the quicker they can place a bid of course so typical category examples we see used or travel and restaurants dining entertaining collectibles there's two way to you to utilize categories and you can add them first you can predefined the categories while you're mapping out the auction or second as you're loading an item and you realize this doesn't really fit into anything let me make a new category you can add one right then in there I recommend mapping out the categories in advance and then modify as necessary especially if you run an auction in the past or something similar and you kind of know what's going to come in so creating categories in advance here's how to get that started on the items page you click categories you'll see a separate grouping click Add or view and when adding categories at a name for the category that is pretty descriptive and the only thing that's required there is a name there are some other fields that you can fill in but they're completely optional so an important note regarding catalog and categories all categories are included in the printed and online catalog by default to exclude any category from the catalog you can click on the appropriate checkbox so for some reason you're printing a catalog and you want to only want to show the law if action items as a mini book of some sort then you want to click the ones that you want or a vise versa if you only want to show the silent ones and send that out and save the live ones as a surprise later totally up to you but that's the option that you can click on or click off for categories it makes it a lot easier an additional item categories that we talked about that are frequently used are baskets food drink and novelty items I know it's easy to say food ticket drink ticket when we're going through this as well as raffle ticket but I want to differentiate tickets are really designed are tickets within Austria are designed for event admission these are items that's why I'm including these in the item section here so you've got basket food drink those are all items raffles are also all items and if you haven't used the basket builder with in Austria you're missing out on a whole lot of fun you know lots of times little bits and pieces come in as donations and you're like oh what am I going to do with a little $5 Dunkin Donuts although my son loves Dunkin Donuts so he would want that but if you want to build them together in a basket you put those in his partials and then you can kind of gather them together electronically roll them all up together I'll show all the donors it'll show all the retail values and it makes a really nice presentation online and on your catalog so let's move on to adding a donor all donors individually you can add a donor individual as items come in or if you've been working with auctions before you can upload a list of donors from an Excel spreadsheet or a CSV file the adding the items is simple you click add item and add the pertinent details and multiple images what's really cool on Austria is there's a lot of room to put some description really sell the auction item provide as much detail as you can that will gain attention and gain bidders what's also cool is you can put multiple images in for an item and when people are viewing the auction catalog online it'll put a nice little photo scroll on it and it really gives movement to the item page so if you have some items that are super special and you really want to draw some attention to it a little bunch of photos in there and it will help your bids increase so octorok has a built in all auction pricing policy that saves time and sets the starting bid minimum bid increments and for silent auction items have a conversation amongst your team as you agree upon some guidelines first because opinions on pricing tend to shift as the auction gets closer so fair warning if you utilize the global pricing within octree a-- it applies to the current items that are loaded in the system at that moment of time it will not continue to apply the pricing rules for any new items at it so you'll either a have to reapply the pricing rule or be set the extra items manually so as you can see it's highly recommended to at all or almost all your items and then apply a pricing policy towards the end when the items are mostly loaded incomplete let's talk tickets and tables they go hand-in-hand like I said tickets should only be used for an event in May you can set up all sites all set all sorts of ticket configurations you can include meal choices you can have multiple ticket sales if you want to have early sales you can do that with a discount you can have coupons you can track all your ticket sales you can do e tickets and then yes of course you can sell tickets at the door because you know these people show up at the last minute if there are still tickets and you want to sell out your event so the ticket feature is tied to bidder creation I'm going to repeat that the ticket feature is tied to bidder creation so when somebody buys a ticket they are creating their bitter record so you don't want to enable this for items that represent other kinds of tickets such as a raffle ticket or a drink ticket like I said those would be for sale ie tomes so this is what the ticket dashboard looks like your ticket dashboard is where you can add tickets configure sell and manage the tickets these are for the event admissions you can sell your tickets online you can do early bird pricing you can sell complete complete tables in the form of a sponsorship and then afterwards you can send eat ich 'it's there's more advanced features for coupon codes teacher tickets and special invitees also you can visit that information on our user guide so the table feature in the OREA platform is quite robust not only can you sell the tickets but you can also set up table assignments you can add the table and define the number of seats if you have tables for 6:00 or tables for 8 or tables for 10 or multiples you can go ahead and set up each one separately within the system and then you can drag and drop the bidders on the table itself since you added the see quantity the system completely keeps track of how many seats are empty at each table so you can continue to fill the open tables it's like putting all the names on a sticky and moving them around on your kitchen table but a whole lot smarter and edits can be made at any time including changing tables at check-in so let's talk a little bit about bitters there are no limits on the number of bitters that you can have registered for your auction event if you want you can register bidders individually they can self register themselves through their website as they're purchasing tickets or if you really want you can import them off an Excel spreadsheet and bidders can like I said register themselves on the online through registration so let's talk a little bit about bidder registration set up so this is setting up for the better worse to be able to register before the bidding begins they need to register of course registration will provide them with a bidder number that will be used throughout the bidding process and they can always use their bidder number also for purchases as well as donations so through the years we've received lots of requests on how to handle bidder registration thus there are multiple drop-down options that can be configured on the bidder registration setup section I'm going to examine a couple of these closer and those that are most relevant to an in-person event or a silent auction where you want to enable online registration tickets and tables on your dedicated website so on your bidder registration and you can see the little arrows there I'm literally flipping through each of these as we go so I got to this page like I said by flipping on the online bidder registration and the online registry bidder registration configurations are pretty much self-explanatory here you can see that a start and end time and then they can opt-in for text the most important is to change the enable online bidder registration here to yes to do this you click the button adjust the fields you see fit the next two are pretty straightforward we'd better want to bring your attention to them also so registration contact options refers to the fields that you will have for the bitter registration page and that you want the bitter to provide try to request the least amount of info that you need to encourage and not discourage registration online payment options you can read through those and make some adjustments and the last line I want to bring to your attention is important require card to be registered during registration I know some people think oh my gosh absolutely we totally want to do that but talk about it amongst your auction team and powwow with your board and your treasurer to make a decision that fits your audience if you know people are good for the money you may not want to require credit cards at registration and you want to give bidders the benefit of the doubt you can always collect payments afterwards via checkout process so let's talk a little bit about the website you've set up the organization you set up the donors you set up the iter the items and the bidders configured now you need to work on the dedicated website don't worry you can make this super easy using one of the pre-made templates and call it dawn but if you want to invest a little bit of time and what a creative team member to help your website Sparkle there are all sorts of configurations that the creative people love to use and just as a highlight there's colors there's fonts you can add images you can add a carousel of images background images and you can really let the website take on the personality of your event or your organization as well there's all sorts of other pieces that you can add in for donation buttons and your auction catalog can be configured so setting up the website is both easy and pretty these this is an example of what the website page looks like and then on the right there's a little video on how to do it as well as the templates like I said there's video and video backgrounds donation buttons the website is usually utilizing a shopping cart mechanism for the for sale items and donations so it's really super easy to use for your registrants and your people that are coming to your event there's also some really cool about us cards that are available to showcase your auction team there's a sponsorship catalog on the website which is really cool so you can either make a separate page for your sponsors or a separate catalog and you can also add a sponsorship row which just shows a fixed number of sponsors logos and those will automatically rotate every few seconds so this is really cool you can use this to optimize your auction when you're selling in your sponsorships let them know that they're going to be on your sponsorship catalog you can even draw that sponsorship row into the header of your auction and that way they show on every single page so that's a good way to push along your premium sponsorships so here's just an example and because I'm having to do share screen I can't pull up a third screen but here's an example of a recent auction that took place on October 1 you can see how pretty they made their auction page their website page so like I said this webinar is about setting up the silent auctions however I would be remiss if I didn't take this full circle with a full couple of a couple notes on closeout and check out so there's many many ways that groups handle closeout and many times they change from year to year based on experiences there is no right or wrong way here I guarantee it and I'll share you just a couple options so that you know kind of where your team might fit and where your audience is best connected so big picture you record the final bid and purchases or donate you collect payment and then you provide a bitter statement via email or hard copy or text okay looking a little closer quit my favorite for silent auctions is to utilize the quick bid entry page this is so cool because you're collecting you know fifteen twenty thirty a hundred silent auction bid sheets how do we power through these you do that using the quick bid entry form and it almost takes me longer to explain this than it would for you to log in the final bids so you go to the quick bid page and you can see one two three four across the top and you can literally key everything in you type in the item number hit tab type in the bidder number hit tab and put the amount hit tab and then hit the record button so I'm it's really quick work of a big stack of silent auction bid sheets if you want to practice this we suggest you do so on the octree a demo and this keeps your auction data nice and clean and gives you a chance to try out the quickvid trick quick bid page and train volunteers it's always a tongue twister so check out is synonymous with payment collection you can check out the bidders in mass with a batch check out if you had collected cards or you can do it as singles if somebody's standing in front of you and says hey I need to go right now so if you have credit card processing enabled you can quickly process multiple checkouts at once for all bidders that have a credit card registered their account the batch checkout will process a payment equal to the outstanding balance for each bidder makes sense right or you can do individual checkout if that's a better match for your event timetable here's a really cool built-in option and I'm traveling back to the notifications page in that last segment it said did you want to send item when item one notifications and when you send item one notifications two winning bidders by email at the end of the event you can include a payment link for them and this includes a personalized length allows the bidder to play pay online and this will only be enabled if your credit card processing is enabled so that's why I bring that to your attention now while you're studying everything up so as you can see my little puppy dog he's very relaxed because he's sitting back and watching the dashboard tally for checkout you can see the numbers move swiftly as the auction closes and as the bidders click there make a payment button so you can see we really mean it when we say from first donation to last receipt and all the bidding in between Audria does make it easy but it's never over until it's really over you are going to want to go back and do some evaluations on how your auction went and there are tons of reports that are available on the Austria website and I'll just summarize the high points here to give you the knowledge to explore and implement after clicking the report category you'll find pre-built reports that will cover almost all your needs however we know you might have that one treasurer person or that one quantitative analysis person on your team that will want more information and you can modify those reports by adding columns and that's where the add column comes in so to help teams stay on track I have created three or Autry has created three checklists we've got an event kickoff checklist which is what you'll kind of want to review with your team as soon as you guys decide that you're going to do an option you've got your event launch checklist which is when you're ready to go public with the actual auction and then your event day readiness checklist this is kind of right before when you need to print your bid Sheets things along those lines and those will be posted hopefully by tomorrow morning once I get everything up in the system after this when I finished the video recording and these will be available for you to review with your team sprint put them under your pillow and sleep with it however you want to utilize them so these just some of the resource links that I referred to throughout the presentation an email will be going out shortly after like I said probably tomorrow that will have all the resource links as well as those PDFs and you can always stay in touch with us we post daily to Facebook and Twitter on Pinterest we have a couple different boards with over 500 pins that are links to direct donation requests just from retailers directly through products as well as manufacturers you can always email us hello a talk tree accom and I also dropped on there our demo address because I find that a lot of teams really don't want to mess around with their data and doing it on the aux Rhea demo is a good way to train as well as try some stuff out [Music]