0:06  
We are live. Let me just get on the main stage see my tech confirmation here? Yep. All right. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the afternoon of Generosity Xchange, we are barreling through a lot of amazing content. And one of the things that I want to highlight is that this entire conference is free. We have some premium stuff, like swag boxes, VIP items, but when you get down to it, you didn't have to pay anything to do that. Now, there's a lot going on in this event. It would be great if money company gave me oodles of money to put this type of stuff on. That's not how this all works. We also love bringing in partners to do special stuff. And so that's why sponsorships are so key because this is all for you. And ClickBid. And in turn one of my favorite people in the sector. Matt Burnell is a sponsor of Generosity Xchange. So I want to give some kudos to you folks. If you enjoyed putting the chat if you enjoyed Swamp Water last night. If anybody checked out Swamp Water, I want to hear about about it in the chat, please. I know I did. And that was because of our friends at ClickBid. Matt, how you doing today?

1:42  
I'm doing good. Thanks. Awesome.

1:44  
So we have a really exciting presentation. For you from you. What are you going to be walking us through?

1:53  
Well, as the title suggests, we're going to go soup to nuts on a silent auction event a little bit about how people set up run, manage the auction events and how technology can make all of our lives a little bit easier.

2:10  
So we're just gonna like walk through and show us something and people are going to sit there and they're not going to interact with this whatsoever, right? 

2:16  
Oh, no, no, no, we've got we're at we're, we're pushing it out a little bit a little bit bigger. This time, we're going to let people join a scan a QR code, participate in real auction items, real, real fake auction items that they can they can bid on compete against others in the webinar, and we'll see who wins.

2:35  
And there's real table stakes here, folks. So we I'm going to just tell you right now, if you're tuning in, participate, participate. Matt, thank you. Welcome to the main stage of Generosity Xchange, thank you so much to ClickBid for their support of the event. As our bronze sponsor, and the floor is yours. I'll put your stuff on screen, and I might come back for q&a later. You know, if you need me, I'm here. But otherwise, it's your show, sir.

3:05  
All right. Well, thank you, Tim, I appreciate it. I hope everybody is ready to participate, you'll you'll already see the QR code on the right hand side of the screen. And, you know, like I said, we you know, I think all of us have probably said jokingly, at one point or another, that technology is supposed to make our lives easier. And if you're like me, then I've definitely had my share of times where I've actually not felt that it's easier. You're like trying to sleep at night without some light blinking in your eye, from a phone or computer or some crazy thing. Or trying to find some quiet time without email and text messages and Instagram, whatever. But there are some things in life that when we do apply technology to them, they do get easier. You know, I just I have a car with this adaptive cruise control. And I just, you know, I think it's the coolest thing because I can set my cruise. And I don't have to like, you know, accidentally, you know, tailgate, somebody, my car adapts to it. That's kind of a clever way that technology makes our lives a little bit easier. And my hope is that as I get through this demonstration, we're going to find out that technology Mobile Bidding makes our lives easier because mobile bidding in the last least the 20 years that I've been doing it a ClickBid. It definitely increases your auction totals. And it's really, I always say it's not, it's not magic, it's math people bid more when they can bid from a phone. And they can bid from anywhere else in the room or even from home. And so you get more bids and more bids equals more donations. And so how do we tie it all together? You know, my goal is to walk you guys through that experience and give you some you know, real world examples and tips that I've learned over the 20 years of actually being on site at events going to events supporting cheer Are these so that, you know, this will make your lives just a little bit easier as well. So let me two things. One, I have a lot of notes over here on my notepad, if you knew me, you would know that I tend to, if I see a soapbox, I can't help but get on top of it, and rant and rave for a while. So and I also love to tell stories. So in the spirit of trying to stay on a schedule, I have my notes, and I'll probably be looking down at them a lot. I think the more I look down, the better our webinars going. And then the second thing is I do have someone, a friend of mine, who's also a co worker is in the chat as well and can answer questions if you have specifics. His name is Mike. He's done a lot of events with me, you know, 1000s and 1000s of events through the years. And we've learned a lot. And so we're all we're always happy to share any kind of experience or notes that we have. So you don't have to wait until the end, you can ask your ask your question now. And even though I'm not looking at chat, because I'm trying to stay focused, you know, he'll be able to answer that for him. So what do we have over here we have two screens, I have set up the one on the right is a circle diagram with a QR code in the center, I'll describe the QR code right now what that is, if you take your phone, and you open up your camera, and you pointed at that QR code, it's going to take you to a website. And that website is our mock auction that we're doing for this webinar. It's called the winter wonderland gala is the screen that I just popped open here. If you want to join in the web, join in this and make this even more interesting webinar, just go ahead and pop your phone or email, you'll do a quick registration, the address isn't required. And then it's going to send you a one time login code that one time login code means you don't have to have a password or thumbprint or any of that stuff. It lets you log in validate who you are, and boom, you're bidding and go ahead and bid. What we're gonna do is the the person who who wins, placing the most bids, not the highest, because we're all this is all funny money. But whoever places the most bids, well, I'll let Tim know who that person is. And we're gonna announce, and they can have a swag box. So we're gonna pop open that QR code one more time. And let's talk about this circle, this circle represents the lifecycle of your silent auction event. And it's going to help me keep focused stay on track. But it's also a very common process that we that we go through when we set up, run, maintain and close out an event. I mean, that's what we really want, we want to start an event successfully, we want to execute it successfully. And we want to be done with it. And we want to know that we're done with it. And so that's again, where Neon comes in when we get to the Neon baby section. So the lighter blue section, lighter, lighter blue circles represent the before the doors open. And the darker blue represents once those doors open, and things start rolling, and then we'll wrap up with the integration. So

where do we start when we start a silent auction, because we're using technology, we get to build what's called a landing page. And I, I just gave you a QR code to send you to that landing page. And I think that, you know, over the years, and even especially with COVID, we've really kind of coined this the virtual venue. When you do event, when you do an event, you have a ballroom, a hotel ballroom, a clubhouse or, or a school gymnasium, that becomes your venue that everybody goes to they have to be physically present. They you know, they have an evening, like let's say this coming Saturday. But that's always been a limitation. We you know, without technology before COVID, during COVID, it's always been a limitation. Wouldn't it be awesome, especially if we're an Alumni Association, or we're a research organization that has constituents all over the country all over the world, if we can get them to participate, learn about the event, even if they can't come to the event, we want them to be at the event we're gonna we don't want to sell them tickets and they can come and participate, celebrate. But even if they can't, they can still get a piece of that experience. And that's something you want, obviously, because we want them to stay engaged, we don't want to lose them.

So what makes a good landing page? Well, I'm going to, I have two screens open. Like I said, on the left hand side, I have my ClickBid admin. This is our dashboard. And like I said, trying to make things easier for us. We put all this data in one place, and we organize it over here on the left hand side. And in this case, for the landing page, I'm going to go to my software settings and edit my landing page content. And you can see here that I have some tabs. And then I also have some content. And I can go ahead and edit all of the pieces of this landing page. Now. When you when or when organizations work with ClickBid, we do a very, very intense deep dive into the platform. I don't want to bore you with all of that today I want to talk about processes. I want to Talk about some helpful hints and tips that I've learned over the years. But when people work with us these these menu options, there's quite a bit in here that you can change manage. Like, for instance, if I want to notice on my menu here, I'm not actually selling tickets to the event. What I want to do though, is I do want to sell tickets, and I'm going to say yes, and I want to point to my gala Tickets page. Now, if I refresh my screen, I will now see the buy tickets blank. And so we'll take a look at that too. But these things over here will change or manipulate what's on here. But the big question is what makes a good landing page? Well, I always say a very captivating. You know, if you're an artist, you would say an arresting image that you would put in the background of your title and call to action. And so I always say, and this has been, you know, something we've, when I read it, we originally designed it, we thought it would be much more self explanatory. But organizations will oftentimes put a flyer or a PDF or something in the background, I always say put a photo, a photo that can be used as a wallpaper that can really present your organization pictures, speak 1000 words, so find a photo of your organization in action, and put it on here, you could get a picture from last year's gala. In this case, I chose a, a kind of a wallpaper ish winter theme, because we're doing a winter event. And then obviously, you have the mechanics of the landing page where people can log in, register bid in the silent auction and so on. But then underneath that you have you definitely want to have about about the event, we want to make sure that we clearly explain the time location, cost, arrival tire, all the things that people need to know about the event, the events, gonna be in your head nonstop for the next, you know, two, three months while you plan it is important to remember that other donors are going to see this for the first time, so they need to hear all of it. And so you want to make sure you hit all those checkboxes. And then one thing that I always recommend in an event landing page is the ability for your donors to help you collect auction items. auction item soliciting for items can be a really time consuming and complex job. And so what we want to do is try and help make that easier. I have another way here in a second, that'll make it even easier than this. But many of your donors have a kind of a favorite wine bottle that they've been holding on to that they would be willing to donate or maybe a collectible or maybe tickets to, you know, a theater presentation or a musical or gas, a gas card, anything that they would be willing to contribute to your event. And they just need to fill this out, they can even submit photos. And this can go right into your auction catalog. So always having a donate an item form is really, really helpful. And it'll make your job just a little bit easier. You know, again, we're trying to use the technology to make life a lot less complicated. And then of course, that gives the organization all of your information as as a donor of the item, so that they can give you the proper acknowledgement and thank you for of course, we would be remiss if we didn't promote our sponsors, and a landing page, a bidding auction site and an auction site is a great place to put sponsor logos and to increase the opportunity of exposure for these for these local businesses. So that they'll continue to donate and they'll continue to sponsor your event. You can even find you can even put them in tiers to say auction sponsor so that this one sponsor underwrites the entire cost of the AV company, the silent auction technology, the you know, maybe the lighting some of the technology that goes into your event, and then they can get special placement in this can all go on the landing page that you'll then be promoting. And last, of course, we want to make sure we put an auction preview now one thing I like to say about an auction preview is you don't have to have all the auctions to preview them off. If we were saying that this is two months before your event, it's you know, two months before your event I will try not to do the math and pick a date. But you may have two thirds of your items or half of your items even that's okay just put what you have out there. When Pete even when people donate they go to this they go into this page right here the Manage items and we're keeping track of them for you in the software and then you're choosing how to display them on the bid site. Well what's really important is that you want to have things to communicate to your donors from from now which I had said was two months from the event. We want to have things to reach out and and and tell them about and you know visuals are always really important. So photos of auction items are automatic winners when it comes to promoting your upcoming silent auction. So let's say you have half of your auction items, then put it out there put this put this webpage this landing page out there, share it in your you know your newsletter called You know, save the date, that kind of thing. And then when you add auction items, do more emails, do more Instagram posts to do a tick tock dance with you holding on to the sign guitar that, you know, hopefully Sunday, as long as you don't drop it, somebody will be able to take home with them on the night of the event. This all creates activity buzz and clicks to your landing page, which is exactly what you want. Now, one thing I do, over the years, I mentioned that early promotion, and that kind of thing, you know, doing Instagram posts and things.

You know, one of the one of the big areas that organizations succeed is when they take seriously the idea that just because we build this landing page doesn't mean they will come. You know, this isn't Field of Dreams, unfortunately, you want to build this landing page and make it really, really good and make it as good as it can be. And you're going to use this admin page over here on the left to do it. But when it's done, you need to follow a very strict, very well laid out communication strategy. And we have a communication strategy that one of our charities gave us and we adapted it with their permission. And really, you know, it's hard to see probably on the webinar, and that's okay, you don't need to be able to read the line items. What's important is that there are line items, which is my is my whole goal in this is to say, make a list, there's a lot of tools out on the internet, you know, to do tasks and, and to do items and assign things to different people. But the goal is to do it to say hey, we need to send out a save the date, we need to send out a our landing page has been launched, we need to send out a reminder that our landing page has been launched. And you need to set those dates so that it just becomes a matter of checking things off the list. Instead of wondering, should I have done more? Did I do the right thing Did I did I send that email, those kinds of things become really, really important and leave a place in there for promoting the auction items, promoting ticket sales and so on. And so you know, that's going to be that's something that you know, of all of this presentation, is something I can't stress enough is making sure that you stay on top of your communication because again, if you build it, it doesn't necessarily mean they will come you want to do as much as you can to draw people in. And because you have a constituency, that should be relatively easy because you can reach out to them on a regular cadence. And here I am looking down again at my notes to make sure I haven't gone off too far.

Back to my admin, and down here to my auction items. One of the things I want to say is that in this demo, if you've been using it and signing up using that QR code that I have, right there, we're down here to items I glanced over, I kind of bounced over tickets will kind of work that into the items. But we have a partnership with a company called Travel pledge, and they are a experience gather is what I've called them. They create, they connect with business owners, property owners, golf clubs, hotels, and they they secure opportunities for nonprofits to add to their silent auction. And so this is their this is my admin within their site. The nice thing is, is that within ClickBid, you can automatically bring those items into your auction. So if you're having a hard time soliciting items, or you need a few items to really take it over the top, you want to promote something really big like a two night stay where I'm from on the Lake Michigan, shoreline, maybe a really cool night out on a boat, have some kind of you know, a nice, you know, river cruise or something that I can get from travel pledge and bring it into my ClickBid account. We also have a partnership with an organization called Hga fundraising and they do the same thing. So you could literally pop up a silent auction without ever soliciting any items. And they get added to your account, there's no cost to get them into your account. And you pay a small percentage kind of like a consignment only with better rates to the tribal pledge organization who has negotiated those low rates for you. So that's a really cool thing. And in fact, two three of the items that I added to our account, if I go to my manage Items page, the two of the wine samplings and the two nights of romance near Lake Michigan. Those are actual items I pulled in from travel pledge now nobody needs to pay for these you can bid as much as you want. We'll delete all the bids. This is just for fun, but go ahead and bid on those and do some oh it looks like I've been out bid so that's so that's nice people are people are placing bids and what happens is when I'm out bid I get a text message on my watch my phone that says Amen. Don't miss out on this auction item. So that was kind of fun. I like to see that. Now, if I go back to my event flow Let's talk just a little bit about tickets, you obviously need to set up ticket sales and sell tickets to your event. And we certainly allow that if you come up to my I had mentioned earlier, I added that to my landing page. And now I can sell tickets. One of the nice things about ticket sales is that you you want to track headcount, you want to track meals, you want to you want to figure out who's seated at what table, and so on, you know, if they can't make it, can they make a donation sponsorships, your ticketing page should be gathering all of that information so that you don't have to go back and chase people down later for that. So when I buy two seats, one for me one for my spouse, I can say oh, we would both like the veal, then that becomes part of the headcount and the meal count for the catering. And again, in in your mobile bidding platform, like ClickBid, it all should be, like I said, everything gets brought into one space so that you can see it organized in your menu here. And this is obviously by designed by us to make sure that we are truly living up to the standard, that technology should make your life easier. And that is definitely something we work very hard to do. So your ticketed guests can participate immediately in the silent auction. Once it opens, we know that again, if we were two months out from the event, we launched our ticket page, again, that's another email, that's another blog post, that's another Instagram post, you know, tick tock, you know, let your creativity fly and put all that stuff out there. That's those are not another opportunity for that. And then as those people, once you get to the point of getting to the kickoff, which we come to next, then those guests can automatically start participating in the silent auction. So we get to this kickoff phase, again, me looking down at my notes so that I don't lose track of where I'm going here.

I call it the pre event or the kickoff, let's say we are now fast forward, we started two months before the event we fast forward it is now the Monday before the Saturday event, the Saturday event is at a is it a ballroom at a local hotel, and Conference Center. And it's Monday now, and I want to kick off the auction, I want to welcome everybody to the auction and I want them to participate. And in bid. The reason I want to do that there's a couple of things that are important about this is one, it gives people a chance to start bidding. If I can let people bid from Monday through Saturday, then they can participate in they can get they can start to increase the total that I'm bringing in, which is the ultimate goal is to raise money. But it also gives people familiarity. If they have a chance to use the software, it's not going to change from Monday through the end of the auction on Saturday. This gives people a chance to get familiar and comfortable many, many events that I've been to. When we check people in and they come to the to the table. I can ask them Hey, did you already check in through your phone? Oh, yeah, I did. I've been bidding Oh, then you're all set, you're ready to go into the event. And start, start mingling, you can go to the open bar, you can look at the auction items. If you have any questions, let us know we're happy to help. And they can skip the check in line, which is great. Now if you have to hand them a paddle that's, you know, we can give them their paddle because we can see right there where their what their paddle number is. But this week long experience gives them a chance to bid and participate in the silent auction, it also opens up your your event from just outside of those four walls, which have always been a limiting factor. I mean, the hotel lets us in at a certain time we set up, we do the event, we have to be out by a certain time, you're always limited in your fundraising to those those few hours that you get that space. But when you open up your auction early, you can now expand you have things that you can communicate. So I go back to my communications agenda here. And I can have a checklist on there that says you need to send out several emails during that week, to remind people about the font, I need to remind people about the silent auction to remind people about, you know, the great food that was provided by you know, a and b catering. And so that's, you know, those are the things that you want to be communicating. So you're expanding the reach of your event outside of that single night on Saturday night. So one of the things I want to do, because we're all here and we're using the software, I'm going to actually compose a message to all of us and I'm going to choose a filter. And I'm going to say all bidders and I'm going to put down bracket F bracket which is a shortcode for somebody's first name. I hope you're enjoying the event. Don't miss out on our great items. Pack here to bid and then I'm going to do bracket you bracket. Now this is going to send I'm going to send this now and let's do that So now everybody who signed up and scan the QR code and part is participating in our auction is going to get a text message. And it's going to say what I had written down. And it's going to include a link to jump back into the software and keep bidding. So we're keeping people reengaged, I can send this out, I would send this out on the Monday that I opened the auction, that would be my big announcement to all of the guests who bought tickets, the ticket holders, people that have imported into my into my bitter list, they would all get a message that says, Hello, the auctions open start bidding now. And then you can start to see those totals climb. And you can send it on a Wednesday and then on Thursday, Friday, and then several times during the event itself, this is a great way to communicate very quickly with your donors that are participating in the auction. And it looks like there's my message. So yup, it just came in. So if I were participating in the event, I could go ahead and tap on that link, and keep hitting with everybody else. Now that's the kickoff, the day before the event, I want to send one more text message that says, let us know you're attending the event. And I'm going to go to auction settings. And I'm gonna go to bitter settings. And then I'm going to allow right now I'm going to actually scale it back a little bit here. If if I were to send a message now, because I'm allowing mobile check in when you ever fly and you you know, you get the email from American Airlines or delta that says, Check in early skip the line and you know, don't have to handle all that mess. This is what this is, I'm going to say that from 825. Today, anybody who logs into the bid site is going to get a message. And I'll just show you what that looks like. Here, I'm going to go into my into my bidding site. And

I got my text, I tapped on my text link. And I need to log out so that I can so that I can show you what it looks like here and put in my cell phone.

And then I get a lot one time login code. And it's 341703341703. And then it says continue and login. So now if I'm when I get that text message I started show you if there's a yes or a no do I want to let people know that I'm coming to the event, yes or no. And that gives me a chance to say yes. And I can tap on that yes button or it's a thumbs up. And it says Oh, Matt's coming. Matt's coming to the event. And that's me saying I don't want to stand in line, I just want to come in. And you can have somebody at the venue say, Hey, if you pre checked in, you're all set, just go ahead, head to the bar, head to the auction tables have a great night, everybody else can stand at the tables. And that's where we get to event checking. We've crossed over from the light blue, pre event and now we are in the thick of it, this landing page to kick off could have taken two months. This to this is going to take hours. So we're going to move we move really fast at this point. And so what we want to do, excuse me with that allow mobile check in and letting people pre check into the event by communicating via text or email. We want people to we want to reduce the amount of overhead that we're going to have at the actual venue itself. Because while ClickBid does provide on site support, if you're you know, if a charity would like us to be on site, we certainly can be we have staff to do that. We prefer that the organization save as much money as possible and run the event with their volunteers. And I'll show you I'm going to give you an example of how that works. But I do want to talk about the check in experience the two I always I look at it as like a big smiley face. The two hardest parts of your event are the check in process. And the checkout process is the busiest and they're up here and then everything else kind of is easy underneath it so it looks like a big smiley face. But these two points are there going to be a frown or smile. Depending on how you organize and setup. This is again where planning really comes into place. I recommend you know and this is just the brass tacks of how I've usually see it done and how I recommend it being done is you grab an eight foot table with skirting and drape and you have that at the check in area where people can come in. You want to make sure that you have enough space so that if people all of a sudden show up at 6pm you have enough room for them to check their codes to do the step and repeat and then be at the check in table. Then I recommend two or three, four depending on how many guests you have. Usually we recommend I think it's one check in volunteer for every 100 attendees. Then you have them seated at the table with a laptop Been a mouse. And the reason you know, I recommend a table chairs, laptop, you know, it's we've got the Met, we've got great technology, I could check somebody in from my phone. And that's true. But your volunteers will be there for probably an hour at least. And it's probably going to be dark, it's going to be loud. And we want to make sure that we create the best, best opportunity for success. And to me a nice laptop with a screen, you know, a mouse if possible, so that people in a in a chair for our, for our guests, or our volunteers who are so willing to be here, so that they can sit and operate, that, to me is the best case scenario. People know where to go, when they see a table with a little sign on it that says check in if people are volunteers are mingling around, then it kind of creates a little bit of chaos. Now the probably one of the most important things I'm gonna say in this entire session, which we're at the halfway point, is what I'm going to say here, and that this is something it's just because I've seen it so many times, volunteers are absolutely amazing. And they will, they will run your check in and they will run your checkout, like, like they'll run a great as long as they're there. And what does that mean, that means that 10 minutes before the doors open, and 10 minutes before checkout begins, you want to have your volunteers seated at their desks, or at their stations in front of their computers ready to go. Because as the first person goes, so goes the rest of the evening. Meaning when the first person comes in to check in, if everybody's kind of standing around, not doing a whole lot, this can create a lot of problems, because now that person's waiting to be checked in, everybody's kind of scrambling, then another person will come in before that person's done, and then another person, another person, it'll start to snowball, and you'll find yourself behind. And you don't want that to happen. If you what I say is if the doors open at six, your volunteers need to be there by 530. If you're really worried about your volunteers being there on time, tell them five so that they get there by 530. Training takes just a few just a minute. In fact, I'm going to take you through a volunteer training right now or in a second. But if the volunteers, what I've seen is sometimes volunteers will disappear, they'll go talk to somebody, they'll go on their phone, we want to make sure that they are seated and ready to go 10 minutes early, that will make all the difference, especially a checkout. Because you know when when we get asked to be on site, that that is probably what we spend most of our time doing is making sure that volunteers are in their seats ready to go. And that checkout is being taken care of. And we're checking people in but when it comes to check in, let's say somebody walks up to my station and says Hi, I'd like to check in and I and I'm on my butler screen, which is what I call the the Fisher Price ClickBid screen. So we this is the easy, the easy screen that takes you away from all of this admin. It's under the event central tab and it's Butler. And so what I do is I come in here these are this is the screen that all of my volunteers are using, and I just need to type in some of the last name that somebody says. So if somebody walks up and says Hi, my name is Brunello walski, musky whiskey, and I'm like, Whoa, I don't I didn't hear all of that. But I don't need them to repeat it. I don't need them to try and spell it. I can just I know I heard a burn something. So I type in burn. And then I get a Matt Burnell. Perfect. All right, Mr. Burnell, I see that you have cell phone number that ends in 3962. Is that the phone that you have with you tonight? Yeah, that's, that's my phone. Perfect. I'm going to go ahead and complete your check in and we're going to send you a text message that has a link to bid in the auction. All you need to do is tap that link. And you'll be able to start bidding. If you have any questions. We'll be around tonight to help you bid hope you have a good time the auction is over to the left. Have a great night. And that's it. Now, the next person comes up and they say, Oh, my last name is Smith winsky. And I type in I heard Smith. So I type in Smith actually didn't hear Smith, but this is a good example. So now I didn't find a better and I can go ahead and create one. So if I want to create one, I can put in a first name, a last name. So so let's see Mr. Smith. And the phone number is 321-432-1234. And I say perfect. I'm gonna go ahead and complete your check in and you're all set. I've just gone ahead and sent you a text message. If you have any questions. We're available to help you tonight. Hope you have a great night and then you're on to the next person. And it's just that simple. That's check in. What I also recommend is that somebody from the organization who is a decision maker, be available with a laptop stationed on off to the side just a little bit. Because there are going to be people that come in and your volunteers can handle this very easy process I've seen everybody of all ages do the check in and it works out very, very well. What throws a wrench is when somebody says, Hey, I'm here with so and so and so and so. And I need to change my table assignment, I need to make sure that I get a vegan meal, things that are way above and beyond what a volunteer or even a click that staff member is going to be able to do. So you want to make sure that you have somebody that can make those decisions be available, what I've seen many, many times is the event organizer is is across the ballroom handling something and they're hard to reach. So now I have to I get up out of my my table station, and I have to go find that person bring them but it just kind of creates a lot of pandemonium. I would, I would highly recommend designating somebody who within your organization who has that authority to make those decisions, they're their primary job that night is to be at check in and check out that will streamline everything. Again, one of the biggest things that we do is on site support is we kind of, you know, Shepherd, the check in and checkout process. Because once we go through this, you can see you know, after the event check in in my little diagram here, we go to bidding. And that's those, if you remember the smiley face, we went through check in, now it kind of dips, the activity comes into a little everybody's bidding their bidding from their phone, maybe you need to resend a text message, or somebody accidentally bid on something that they didn't mean to bid on. So they need to back out their bids. But that's really easy and not very common. And so everything starts to low. And as you know, the meal program starts the live auction in the in the funding need, then things start to heat back up with your activity. But really, in that kind of law, things get pretty easy and people scatter. So the volunteers that were at check in, that were helping out are now eating somewhere or they're doing stuff, and you need to make sure they're ready to go at checkout. But before we get the checkout, we get to live auction, and the funding. Now. We're all doing this virtually. So we are we are at. I'm going to I'm going to get back into my site. And so I am actually what I'm going to do you know this will be this will be fun. Because we're Interactive. I'm gonna log myself in.

And it'll send me a one time login code. And that is 578. So if there's one time I can say it out loud 578668. And I am at Brunel. Yes, I am. And so now I'm in the auction. I'm looking around, I'm like, ooh, this one has 30 Oh, really fun. Wow, this charity is doing really well. Okay, so I'm going to do the camping kit. I'm going to bid $770. That's pretty funny, because when I looked it up online, that one, that one was worth 100. So this charity is just gonna be so happy that they got a $770 bid on that. So anyway, I'm bidding and we get to the point, somebody outbid me already, seriously. So anyway, we get to the point of the auction where the auction has closed, and now it's time for the live. Now one of the things that we did in during the pandemic was we obviously had to pivot to virtual events. And so we created and I won't get into too much of it, I'll try to skip some of it is we got into what was called live broadcasting. But we had to do live broadcasting that was real time. I mean, no delay, just like the hop and meeting that we're doing now has, you know, I don't think there's any delay in the hop and meeting but we needed something that to be with was to be as fast as zoom. So we created the the real time event stream so that an auctioneer could talk to a camera and do the do the live auction and everybody at home could basically digitally raised their paddle. But more importantly, we allowed them to be able to give from home during the paddle race that was that was even more important. live auction is one thing but the Paddle Raise if we can get people to participate from anywhere in the world. That's awesome. Because even in the best of times people can't attend. So what I can do is I can actually pop open my broadcaster, and I'm not going to do it because you know, I don't want I'm using my camera right now for our webinar. But if I open this broadcaster screen, it'll let me take my camera and broadcast out to everybody in the event. It will actually show a screen right here on your phone. It's really cool. And even more so you can cop click this little copy button and you can email that to your ad Eating, and they'll be able to broadcast program. So I would send a text message to all of my not checked in constituents that registered for the auction, and I would say, hey, the program's about to start, we're going to broadcast it. Don't forget to log in so that everybody logs in, and they can see everything that's going on in the room. Because the AV team is handling it. It's really easy. They, I mean, it's really easy. For an AV person, it's really easy for anybody, this link right here is what I would use to broadcast to all of you. But I'm already broadcasting to all of you through Hopkins. So you know, it gets a little confusing. But now what I can do is I can do my live auction, and everybody at home can participate. So as a volunteer, I'm going to sit on my again, remember the Fisher Price Butler, I can come down here to your event stream. And I'm going to take control because I'm going to manage the live auction. So I'm going to go to this Johnny Cash sign guitar, click on it. And I'm going to hit start. So the auctioneer says, Alright, folks, let's start the bidding at $500, who's gonna bid $500. So I click on the Bid live button. Let me do that. Again. I click on Bid live from my phone. And now I start bidding up $600. Now I'm winning at 700. And now I'm

going to bid 700 Somebody else can. Oh, looks like I didn't get it in fast enough. Somebody outbid me. Now I'm going to bid 900. And now I'm going to bid 1000. So what's happening is you can see over here, all of these individuals are placing bids from their individual phones. But let's say I see a paddle up in the room. I'm going to click, I'm going to see up somebody bid 1100 out somebody bid 1200. All right, cool. So now we have up we got more, we got more bits folks coming in. So now somebody has a 1300. And notice that I the dollar amount is going up with me. And because we're using real time video, everybody can see this at the same time. And because I'm a volunteer in the room, I'm keeping track of all the floor bids. So now somebody just in the room placed a bid for 1700 Nominate don't we got an 18. Now I'm 1900 somebody plays their paddle. Now you've got somebody in the room in the ballroom bidding against somebody else from home. And so now I'm going to go in once going twice and sold and now I didn't win the item. And we had somebody in the room. Who who in the room won that item. Let me let me let me get their paddle number. Oh, it was 123 Thank you number 123. Up Matt Burnell. Thank you so much. Okay, folks, we're gonna move on now to the raise the paddle. And what we're going to do is we're going to, we need to raise a lot of money, a couple 100,000.

Okay, we've got to raise more than a million dollars. Thank you, Carla. That was very nice of you. And so now, the auctioneer's usually started an increment they start at, you know, let's start who in the room is willing to give $5,000 We need three people in the room tonight. Or if you're at home, and you feel like giving $5,000 Just press that $5,000 button, and you'll notice the volunteer in the room. And these the volunteer in the room, I've said that a few times. They're like a digital spotter. If you've ever hired an auctioneer for your event, you'll get usually a couple of spotters. Sometimes they have a little glow stick, or they have a paddle. And they kind of point out and help the auctioneer find people that are raising their paddle. That's what you're doing as a digital spotter, you're representing everybody at home. So Karen just gave some money. So I'm gonna put my paddle in the air and the auctioneer is gonna say, Oh, we got $5,000 Thank you so much from from somebody online. Thank you. Now, even better, and, you know, I am somewhat limited by my resources, because I'm doing this happen and I'm doing this broadcast. You can also put a screen up on projection so that it shows a thermometer. It shows people's names, it shows how much was raised, you can do something as simple as just how much has been raised. And so the auctioneer can see that in the background to the auctioneer can also get what's called a confidence display on their phone or a tablet if they want to set that on the podium. And they can see all of this happening. So the auctioneer says maybe maybe 5000 wasn't the right amount. Maybe 2500 is the amount for you tonight. If you if we can get five people to give $2,500 then you know we are going to blow the lid off this thing, folks. 2500 bucks. Thank you so much. You know lighly thank you so much, Karen. Thank you so much, Carla, this is this is awesome, folks. This is incredible. You know what we're going to keep moving. How about $1,500 is $1,500 the amount that feels right for you tonight. $1,500. And so now I'm going to give 1500 dollars and maybe I want it to be anonymous. So over here on my right side of the screen, I pressed 1500. And I say, yes, please don't show my name. And now I've given an anonymous amount, so the auctioneer won't know and will shout out your name, and it won't show up on the screen of names. So now I can give 1500 Now remember, everybody else in the room, they're raising paddles, and we're recording those separately. But from home, people are able to give. And now I'm down to 1000. And you can see how this goes, it goes all the way down. And you know, I don't want to belabor this too much, I need to keep moving. So I get on a, I get on a soapbox, and I can't stop. So we do the live and the appeal. And it's all online. And again, I will say this one thing, okay, it is it is another setback, I'm sorry. But my goal, you know, I come from a film and video background. And you know, from, you know, 200 years ago, when I went to college, I got a degree in film. And I've always seen the power of media and the power of video what it can do. And, you know, of course, then I kind of branched into fundraising, and then click that kind of came out of that. But I've always loved the idea of bringing video into, into fundraising. So if you can, if you can expand your ability to fundraise by using the power of video, the power of live video, then I really look forward to the day that charities embrace that and they and they use the technology that's available to them to make that a reality. Because we've always, like I said, been limited by the four walls of the venue, let's break out of that still do the four walls of the venue, thank God, we can all go back to in person events. But there's always people that just can't attend, maybe there's a vulnerable audience that doesn't want to risk it. Or there's people that double booked or they're sick, or they went to out of town or whatever, or they're you've got an Alumni Association spread out all over the world. This is a great way to capture people by using the power of video. And I mean, I'm just a nerd, you know, on a video camera right now, and we're all having an event, we're having an experience. And Tim did this whole experience virtually. And so it's it works, it's powerful. It doesn't need to be high profile, high, high production value, it can be something simple and honest. And so anyway, that again, now I'll get down off my soapbox, and we'll keep going. But I'm going to close this out. And, and then close my butler, I'll close the line the funding need.

And we'll close this window. And now we get to checkout. And back to reality, man, we need to get people checked out. Now remember, if we go back to our checkout, and I had said just like check in your volunteers are key again. So much of what we do is on site support is again shepherding the check in in the checkout. If your volunteers are ready to go 10 minutes before checkout, things are gonna go great. And the reason things are gonna go great is because they're ready again, as the first person, you know that if the auction closes at eight at eight o'clock, at eight o'clock in two seconds, somebody is going to walk up and say, Hey, can I check out early. And so what I recommend is you set a hard and fast checkout time, if you need 15 minutes to get your auction items into the right space. Then you can say you know what, we're getting everything ready, we'll be ready in 15 minutes. If you can just hang on till then even though you probably could figure it out. The time it takes for you to figure it out if you're not ready is too much. And so you want to set that limit. The other thing about checkout spaces is you want to have enough again, a table, you want to have a couple of volunteers that are at a workstation. They're at the same Butler under event Central. They're at the same Butler that they were at, you know in check in. And then when they type in a person's last name. So can I get your last name? Yeah, Brunel. Okay, great. Oh, good. I'm going to check you out.

And you looks like he bought the fund in need. So let's pretend that I had three other auction items, because I haven't closed the auction yet in our demo. But I choose a payment type, I'm just going to choose check, because I'm not gonna put that on my credit card. And I say Submit. Now, that's what the volunteer did at the workstation. But let's say that I had about three things that I checked out for, you know, the, the, the camping thing that I put on there, a gift certificate and a gift basket. I'm going to use something that's brand new state of the art high tech, and it's called a sticky note. And I'm going to take my pen, another high tech device, and I'm going to write down the three item numbers. I'm gonna peel that sticky note off and I'm going to hand it to a runner, and that runner is going to go get those three items for me. As the checkout volunteer. I'm never going to leave this chair. I'm going to sit here and I'm going to help people check out and for every one of Those people that sitting here helping people check out, I have two or maybe three other volunteers that are willing to go run over to the auction tables and pick the items up. As you can imagine, it can take three times as long to pick up items, as it does for me to look them up, and check them out. And so again, in helping you with your auctions, it's really important that your volunteers are on point ready to go five to 10 minutes before checkout begins, because then it'll just be a nice even flow. And for every checkout volunteer, you have multiple runners, I'd even rather have just one checkout volunteer and five runners, because if you imagine I can check somebody out, I can check out for people and maybe in under a minute, and I can have four people running to get items. And then I have that that donor step off to the side. And I take the next person, and then I have that donor step off to the side, we're going to bring you those items we're going to handle to your right here. And thank you so much for your generosity, I hope you have a great night. And then you help the next person and then the next person and it just runs super smooth. But somebody does have to physically go get those items, and you're going to want enough people for that. Alright, so we've gone through the checkout process. And we've checked out all of our items, now we come to Nyan baby. That's why we're here, right? We're at the generosity exchange. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to connect my ClickBid account to Nia. And so I'm gonna go under software settings. And I'm going to connect to bid kit. Now Big kit is our integration between ClickBid. And another platform that really is the end all of your data, you should as a nonprofit, you should have a database that holds all of your donor data, ClickBid is really good at running your auction in your event, selling tickets and that kind of thing. But Neon is going to handle all of the management. And we want to make sure that all those sales get sent over to Neon. So I'm going to click on the Connect, I'm going to disconnect so that we can go through this together. I'm going to click on Connect, and it wants two pieces of information, my organization ID API key if I go to my Neonaccount, and then I click on the gear, and I go to organization profile. And I get my sandbox down here in the bottom left. And I put that into bid kit. And then API key. If I go to back up here to my gears, and then I go to User Management. I know I'm moving I'm trying to keep track of time here. And then I go to my user account, I want to turn on API access, and copy. All of this is in a training hub that we have, we have a whole training series on how to use click here and how to use me. So I'm going to do that, once it's connected, you're gonna see a blue button. And if you click on that, you can disconnect. Now if I go to my Neon tab, and I go to export sales, I'm gonna see two funding needs. Now it's going I've already sent one it's grayed out, let's zoom in a little bit.

You can see it just kind of makes things a little more condensed, but bigger. And so now I have two things that I want to send to them. This will represent all of your donations, auction purchases, ticket sales, anything that you bought or sold and ClickBid. Once it's paid for, you'll see it here. So I'm going to just select this fun to need. I'm going to scroll over to the side, and I'm going to press the search icon. If you just connected me on the ClickBid. After your event, we need to make sure that we match Matt Burnell and ClickBid with Matt Burnell in Neon. So we send the sale to the right place. That would be bad if we didn't do that. So I'm going to press the search. It thinks for a second and it's searching your entire Neon account for any map burnout. So I'm going to grab this first one here and a lot of mapper Nell's right. So I'm going to do Matt Burnell. And then I'm going to choose Export. And then it's going to have to choose a campaign in Neon that I want to send it to, I'm going to call it the houseboat Gala. And I can choose a fund if I want. I can also choose a purpose and a source. These are optional fund purpose and source are optional, the campaign is required and then export. Now keep in mind, we sent it to mapper now and it was a funding need of $1,000. I'm gonna go to my Neon account, and I'm gonna go to fundraising, donation and pledges. And it does say it takes a little while. So it may not be there yet. It's October 20. Let's go and maybe check this one out. Here we go. I think yeah, this is it. This is the let me go to my donation. So this is my

54:54  
Click the donations. There you go. 

54:57  
Yeah. And then sorry, I had a mental illness. apps there. So the houseboat Gala was the campaign, I choose the $1,000. And it's all there. And now as you can imagine, repeat that process over and over for your items and you don't have to send them all you can send just the ones you want. You can send them different campaigns, different funds so that it stays organized. Who, woof I covered a lot of ground. So Tim, if you you can unshare my screen if you want so we can talk. I want to figure out who our lucky winners

55:29  
tell us that the winners. I want to make sure we do that. Because we're going to be welcoming Erica Waasdopr to the main stage very shortly. So let's get some winners established here. How many different people are there?

55:44  
Looks like we got 22 People in our system. So that's good. And let's see. Let's go with Oh man, it's gonna be it's gonna be

56:07  
if it's me, then go to the next person.

56:09  
No, no, let's better number 902 Karen Hearn. Yeah, yeah, she went bananas. Okay. Thank you for your generosity, Karen. I really look forward to getting that payment. And, you know, the charity that benefits No, I'm just kidding. This was all for fun. And I really appreciate everybody participating. It's nice when everybody can kick the tires themselves.

56:36  
Karen Hearn, ping me, DM me. You can see me right in the event staff just DM me and I'll hook you up. That's it. Matt, thank you so much. Thank you so much for your support. Of the I love bidding with fake money. Okay, thank you, Karen. I will here. Let's put you up on the main stage for that one. Congratulations, for everything that you did. Matt, thank you so much for all of this. This is a lot of fun. And, you know, just really, really awesome session. Thank you.

57:14  
Good. Thank you. Hopefully some good tips for everybody. Have a great afternoon.

57:18  
Awesome. Thank you very much. See you see at the next session and make sure if you're interested, go to the sponsor booth. You can submit some interest you can get some video stuff, ClickBid's doing some great work. We're coming into that fall event season so this would be awesome. And Mike is also in the chat. You can directly connect with things too. Okay. Thank you. Thank you

Transcribed by https://otter.ai