Our Patriotic concert is in a few weeks. There are a lot of moving parts to this concert by nature, and for the most part I am ok with taking care of all the moving parts. The audience typically loves this performance, and all of the added extras that come with it.
The ball really gets rolling in May for planning and executing the concert, from securing members of the American Legion and VFW posts for Honor Guard duties, planning and notifying the public about the community chorus that will be organizing and performing, securing the chorus rehearsal director, and getting music ready for the chorus.
One big thing that happens at the Patriotic concert (and also the Holiday concert in December) is a silent auction. Since COVID, we have held the silent auction online and doing so allows us to have the silent auction active for more than a few hours. We used to hold the silent auction during the concert, allowing patrons and band members the opportunity to bid on the items before the concert and during intermission. We then would announce the winners shortly after intermission, which would take up a lot of unnecessary concert time.
With the silent auction now held online, I can more easily monitor it, adjusting the bids if needed to get people interested in the item. We can share the baskets on social media to garner more interest in them as well. And with the auction active for an entire week, we can get people involved who are not even local...and ship the basket to them afterwards!
For the Patriotic silent auction, I start requesting donations from companies in January. This includes preparing and mailing physical requests, emailing requests, and going online to request through donation portals. Donations start trickling in in February, and we see a steady stream through the middle of June. As we are receiving items, I go ahead and group items together for baskets, and just set them in a basket, along with ribbon, cellophane wrap, a bag of crinkle paper, and a rubber band to close the wrap up at the top of the basket. This makes it easier to put the basket together and make it look nice!
I build the baskets in a spreadsheet, along with the value of each of the items, who donated the items, etc. At the end of the silent auction, I add what the auction price was for each of the baskets, so I can see what the value vs sale price was. I try to make sure we bring in at least 50% of what the value was of all of the baskets for that particular auction. So, if the baskets for an auction are worth a total of $5,000, I try to at least bring in $2,500 in the silent auction.
Usually in April or the beginning of May, I will go ahead and set up the initial silent auction website (through 32Auctions). By this point, I have a really good idea of the baskets we will have for the silent auction, so I can start populating the website with basket information. Instead of taking a picture of the basket itself for each one, I use Canva.com to make a photo collage with the logos of the companies that donated items for that particular basket.
May is spent stuffing and wrapping the baskets, and adding a removable sticker with the basket name on it to quickly find the basket after the auction is over. I print out the invoices from 32Auctions, and attach them to the baskets (highlighting the winner's name on each), so the winners can more easily find the ones they won.
On concert day, I take the baskets with me to the performance venue and have the baskets set up out in the foyer, so the winners can get them as they come in, or while at intermission.
The reason I have said all of this is because last night I had a very real dream that it was concert day, and I realized that I had not brought the silent auction baskets with me to the performance venue. Not only that, but I had not even been monitoring the silent auction while it was live, so I had no idea if all baskets had been sold or not. It was quite disturbing to me that in my dream I had allowed such a big opportunity to raise funds slip through my fingers!
