Online Auction Tips for PTAs and PTOs

Parent-teacher organizations have a unique set of needs when it comes to fundraising. They often raise money for both large projects and smaller classroom needs. Most school fundraisers need to reach an audience far beyond their local community to meet their goals. Online auctions are a great way to make this possible. As you consider an online auction for your next school fundraiser, keep these ideas in mind:

Getting Started

Conduct a thorough review with your organization to set clear fundraising goals and strategies. This preparation enhances future events by establishing realistic targets and identifying the best approaches to achieve them.

Form a Strong Planning Committee

Don’t go it alone. Assemble a team to handle tasks like delivering items, collecting payments, and managing online activities. This prevents burnout and makes the process more enjoyable. Plus, working with a team can help you connect with more people in your community!

Start Early with Donation Requests

Businesses often support nonprofits but need sufficient notice and paperwork. Begin soliciting donations three to four months in advance. Target amusement parks, museums, theaters, sports teams, and other businesses that frequently donate tickets, merchandise, and more. Prepare your tax information for online requests.

Develop a Robust Communication Strategy

Clear communication is crucial for a successful auction. Ensure everyone knows when and how to participate. As auction items arrive, build excitement through social media, newsletters, and email updates showcasing your upcoming items.

Give your community ample notice to save the date and send reminders leading up to your fundraiser. Leverage digital tools to create flyers and QR codes, making it easy for your community to access your auction, learn how to bid, and understand the purpose of your fundraiser.

Expand your reach by sharing auction details on your website and community Facebook pages. Engage your feeder schools to spread the word. With the right items, you can attract interest beyond just school families!

Align Auction Items with Community Interests

Tailor your auction items to suit your community’s preferences and budget. Choose items that will appeal to your audience and fit within their price range to ensure active bidding.

Smart Pricing Strategies

Pricing auction items can be challenging. Start bids at 30-50% of the item’s value, especially if it was donated. Community interest will ultimately determine the final price. For unique items like class projects, consider listing them as “priceless” to generate more interest.

Clearly state a “Starting Bid” and minimum raise amount to guide bidders. Starting with lower bids can stimulate more activity. For some items, set a “Win it Now” price slightly above their value, which works well for tickets or gift certificates. Avoid this for high-interest items that could spark bidding wars, like prime parking spots or front-row event seats.

Strategic Auction Closing

The closing phase is key to maximizing your profits. Close your high-value items first (e.g., teacher experiences and premium parking spots). Then, stagger closing times for other items, allowing bidders to redirect their funds if they didn’t win the top items.

Keep the auction period brief—no more than two weeks. Most bidding happens on the first and last days. Ensure the closing date doesn’t conflict with major community events to maximize participation.

By implementing these strategies, you can create an engaging and profitable online auction that supports your PTA’s goals. Connect with us for more tips and a demo of our platform!!

How to use Hashtags to your Advantage

How to use Hashtags to your Advantage Banner

What exactly is a hashtag? Hashtags are metadata tags used on social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, and other microblogging services, that help users easily find messages with specific content or themes.

Simply put, a hashtag is a keyword or keyphrase led by a pound or hash sign and typed out without spaces—#AuctionFrogs and #Fundraisers, for example. You can (and should!) include them in all of your social media posts—at the beginning, at the end, or anywhere in between.

Hashtags tie public conversations from different social media users into a single stream. These streams can be found by searching for them, clicking on them, or using third-party monitoring tools. When used properly, hashtags are a great way for you and your brand to make your posts more visible and engaging. They give your audience useful context, cues for recall, aggregate posts and images together, and update like-minded followers on specific topics in real-time.

Quick Tips for your Facebook posts

Facebook creates some unique challenges when tracking how users are interacting with your hashtags. Due to the volume of private profiles, it can prove more difficult to pull complete metrics on your hashtags’ performance.

So, why should you bother trying to incorporate hashtags into your Facebook efforts? Here are a few key reasons why it’s important to include them in your posts:
  • Using hashtags in your Facebook posts make your posts searchable, which is especially important when you consider the multitude of searches Facebook handles every day.
  • Data shows that Facebook posts with hashtags get as much as 12.6% more engagement than posts without them.

Quick Tips for your tweets

Hashtags can be used anywhere in the body of your Tweets. Place them at the beginning for emphasis, add them at the end for context, or let them live in the middle of your post to highlight a keyphrase. They can also be added to your comments when you retweet a tweet, when you reply to a tweet, and even in your Twitter bio!

Take a look at these easy-to-follow Dos & Don’ts:
  • DO encourage your audience to use your hashtags—and give them a reason to use them! Offer a prize or some simple recognition to followers with a Retweet. Either way, your audience will respond better when there is an added value to their participation and engagement..
  • DO use branded hashtags. Twitter Ads allow you to add a fun, visual element whenever your hashtag is used by your followers. These branded hashtags are shown to increase engagement by up to 10%, so if you have room in your budget, give Twitter Ads a try!
  • DO partner with influencers or followers to gain exposure and visibility for your brand.
  • DON'T use ALL-CAPS. Unless your hashtag is an acronym, ones displayed in all-caps feel a bit like shouting. Plus, since they are case-sensitive, those in all-caps will require extra effort for your followers to type out.
  • DON'T try to force your hashtags. They are meant to be inclusive, shareable, and discoverable. If it doesn’t organically fit within a Tweet, it will feel forced and lose its intended purpose.

Quick Tips for your Instagram stories

While you can post hashtags in your image captions, you may want to consider moving them to the comments section instead. Including your hashtags as your post’s first comment allows your followers to focus on the great caption you’ve written first.

Much like with Twitter, it is also possible to include hashtags in your Instagram profile bio. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to do so!

Best hashtagging practices

  • Be Specific: When using a hashtag to join a conversation, make sure it is specific and relevant to your topic. Vague and generic usage won’t be very effective or engaging for your audience.
  • Keep it Simple: Hashtags, like hyperlinks, look like spam if they are overused. Keep it to a maximum of three in your posts and comments on Facebook and Twitter (you can get away with a bit more on Instagram). And, be careful not to use the same hashtag twice in one post.
  • Give Context: A tweet or post that contains only hashtags is confusing to social media followers. Be sure to provide context with relevant captions so that you are adding to the conversation.
  • Do your Research: Hashtags are often related to current events and cultural trends. If you’re unsure what one might be referencing, research it on multiple social platforms before including it in your posts. If you’re creating a brand new hashtag, make sure it’s not already being used first.
  • Keep it Short: Don’t string too many words together to create your keyphrase. The best hashtags are relatively short and easy to remember.
  • Capitalize: Remember, hashtags are not case sensitive. If you are combining multiple words together to create your keyphrase, capitalize the first letter of each word to make it easier to read and understand.

Use Auction Frogs for your next Online Auction

Our platform is feature-rich, simple to use, and yields great results. It allows for an unlimited number of item and image uploads, plus it can be customized to reflect your brand identity. And, with a mobile-friendly user experience, bidders can participate on any smart device.

So, get in touch today to see how we can help make your next virtual fundraiser a successful one!

3 Steps to Better Email Marketing

3 Steps to Better Email Marketing Banner

When hosting an online auction, it is important to maintain communication with bidders to keep them up-to-date on how your auction is progressing. Email marketing is one of the best ways to engage your audience. Here are three easy steps you can follow to build better, more “clickable” email campaigns that will stand out in any inbox.

Step 1 | Start email marketing with an eye-catching subject line

Your email subject line is the most important part of your entire email. A boring subject line could cause your email to become buried under hundreds of others. Or even worse, be flagged as spam.
  • Use Emojis: Studies have shown that emotional content increases the effectiveness of email marketing as much as 70%! Emojis are there to visualize the emotion your message is suggesting. When used in email subject headlines, emojis help separate your email from the sea of other emails in your subscribers' accounts.
  • Breaking News: People love news. To be more specific, they love breaking news. Using such announcements in your email subject line is a great way to spark interest with your audience. But, you need to use words that suggest urgency to instigate clicks, such as “Alert” and “Tomorrow."
  • FOMO: FOMO stands for the "Fear Of Missing Out." By including phrases like “Last Chance” or communicating a time limit like “Last Hour,” you can significantly boost your email open rates. Email subject lines that use FOMO with a sense of urgency have a higher open rate—22% over those that don’t.

If subject lines aren’t constructed carefully, you are more likely to see a decrease in open rates, a decrease in conversions, and an increase in spam reports. To avoid this, you should be aware of words that perform terribly in subject lines, such as Newsletter, Journal, Forecast, and Training.

Step 2 | Fill the body of your email with captivating content

Once you pull your readers in with a subject line, your next task is to deliver engaging, informative content in the body of your email that is well organized and easy to read.
  • Write for the Web: Writing email marketing copy is similar to writing web copy. That means it’s important to follow a logical structure, keep paragraphs short, and only include one main idea per paragraph. Use bullets and subheadings to break up blocks of text and make your emails scannable.
  • Consider Mobile Readers: Mobile devices (smartphones, tablets) are used with increasing frequency for reading email. Since only the first few lines of text are displayed as a preview on mobile devices, your first words must contain compelling information or a strong call-to-action.
  • NO SHOUTING: Avoid all-caps and multiple exclamation points in both the subject lines email bodies. Not only are all-caps the equivalent of shouting online, but overuse screams spam, which will hurt your open rate.
  • Visuals Matter: Adding photos, videos, and graphics are just as important in email marketing as they are on social media. Be sure to use aesthetically pleasing color schemes in your email marketing—ones that are eye-catching but still readable.
  • Links, Links, Links: Link as much media as you can back to your website. Add links to your social media accounts, and most importantly, check that all your links are working properly before you send your email.

Step 3 | End by inviting your readers to take action

A call to action is a word, phrase, or sentence that encourages your readers to take a specific action. With the right call to action, you can persuade readers to do something specific, like buying tickets or registering for your online auction.
  • Use Action Words: The best calls to action use action words that let your readers know the specific action they should take next.
  • Create Urgency: Calls to action also use urgency and scarcity to trigger FOMO, making it more likely that your readers will take action. Include a countdown or use language like “Now” and “Today."
  • Get Personal: Good CTAs get personal. While some address readers directly, you can get better results by including CTAs that reflect their control of the process. Try using “Me” instead of “You” in your copy to accomplish this.
A good CTA avoids friction words that might make people hesitate. This removes some of the obstacles that get in the way of readers taking action. Avoid using Friction Words such as  Download, Buy, Order, and Submit.

These 3 Steps to Building Better Marketing Emails have been proven to increase the success of email marketing campaigns, and we hope they will do just that for you. Take a tour of Auction Frogs today to get started with your next online fundraiser today!