Charity auction checklist: the week before, the day, and the hour before doors

By the final week the big decisions are made. What is left is execution, and execution is a checklist game. What follows is the list a volunteer-run evening actually needs, in three passes — the week before, the day, and the last hour — plus the things that go wrong anyway and what to do about them.

One assumption throughout: an ordinary evening of twenty to twenty-five lots for a hundred to two hundred guests, with a silent catalogue running all night and six to eight lots in a live block. Scale the numbers, keep the order.

The week before

• Freeze the catalogue. Final lot list with titles, descriptions, photographs, estimated values, starting bids and increments. Nothing added after this point. A lot added on Friday is the lot with the wrong price on the card, and it is always the expensive one.
• Confirm every donor in writing. Their lot, how they are credited, and the date. Assume one donor in ten will have forgotten entirely; you want to find that out on Tuesday, not on Saturday afternoon.
• Confirm the venue basics. Projector or television plus the cable, sound system with a working microphone, table plan, and — the one people skip — mobile signal in the actual hall. A cellar with thick walls and no wifi turns a phone-bidding auction into a paper auction in about four minutes.
• Decide the money flow end to end. How winners pay, who reconciles, which account it lands in. Put one real euro through the payment link yourself.
• Brief the team. Auctioneer, presenter, two bidding helpers, one money person, one photographer. Roughly one helper per forty guests. One page each: names, times, tasks.
• Print. QR cards per lot — two per lot, because one always ends up under a plate — table cards, and a programme with the silent closing time in bold.
• Email the guests. Doors time, how bidding works, bring a charged phone, and the remote link if you offer one. Three sentences. The people who read it stop being the people who need help at the desk.

On the day

• Collect the physical lots and display them with their cards. Put them where people already walk: near the bar always beats a side room, by a wide margin.
• Set up the screen and run the real display on it for ten minutes. Check it from the back row, in the lighting you will actually have, which is dimmer than the lighting you are testing in.
• Sound check the microphone from the auctioneer's actual spot, not from the sound desk.
• Walk the guest journey yourself, once, on your own phone: come in, find a lot, scan, bid on a test lot, get outbid, read the message. Then delete the test bids.
• Feed the volunteers before doors. Hungry helpers fade at exactly the hour when the closing rush needs them.

The hour before doors

• Open the silent auction so the first guests can bid the moment they scan. Early bids are what makes later guests believe the auction is alive.
• Charged spare phone and the wifi password at the helper desk.
• Reserve prices, if you have them, in the auctioneer's notes and nowhere public.
• Agree two timing signals with the presenter: when the live block starts, and the ten-minute countdown before the silent close.
• Name one decider for anything unexpected. On the night a quick decision beats a good one, and a committee beats neither.

The three most-forgotten items

In practice the same three things get missed, every time, by competent people.

The adapter. Not the cable — the adapter, for whichever laptop is actually presenting. Someone brings a MacBook and the venue has HDMI, and forty minutes disappear.

An announced closing time. Without a specific minute said out loud and printed in bold, there is no closing rush, and the closing rush is where a large share of the money arrives. "The silent auction closes at 21:45" is worth more than any decoration you bought.

A way for winners to take things home. Bags, envelopes for vouchers, and a list at the exit of who won what. Otherwise a helper is carrying an unlabelled hamper around a car park at midnight.

When it goes wrong anyway

It usually goes wrong in one of four ways, and all four are survivable if you decided in advance.

• The network dies. Have the current bids visible on one device and paper bid sheets for the top five lots in a folder under the desk. You will almost certainly not need them. The five minutes it takes to print them buys the presenter the confidence to keep going.
• The projector dies. Move the live block forward and run the silent catalogue on phones alone. Announce totals verbally every fifteen minutes instead. The evening survives without a screen; it does not survive twenty minutes of silence while three people crouch behind a laptop.
• A donor pulls out on Thursday. Do not quietly delete the lot — guests who were told about it will ask. Announce a straight swap or fold the slot into another lot, and tell the auctioneer before they read the programme aloud.
• The auctioneer is ill. This is why the brief is one page and not in one person's head. Your presenter can run six lots from that page. It will be less polished and roughly as profitable.

What people get wrong, and why it felt reasonable

The commonest error is adding lots late. It feels generous: a parent offers something good on Thursday and refusing seems ungrateful. But a late lot skips the description pass, the pricing pass and the printing pass, so it arrives with a rushed title, a guessed starting bid and no photograph — and it underperforms in front of the donor who gave it.

The second is over-programming the live block. Twelve lots at four minutes each is forty-eight minutes of sustained attention from a room that has just eaten. Six to eight is the ceiling. Everything else belongs in the silent catalogue, where it competes for money rather than for time.

The third is a committee of five all half-running the night. Service clubs are especially prone to it, because everyone has held the role before and nobody wants to appear to take over. The pages for service clubs go into how to split the roles so that the person on the microphone is not also the person answering questions about payment.

Afterwards, briefly

Before you sleep: send or schedule the payment emails, thank the volunteers in the group chat, and write down the final total. Everything else waits for Monday — and on Monday, write down the three things that surprised you, while you still remember them. That note is worth more to next year's committee than the whole spreadsheet.

Several of these boxes tick themselves if the bidding runs on auctiontool.ai: QR codes per lot, the screen fed automatically, the close enforced on the minute, settlement emails the same night. The full setup path is in the organiser's guide, and a rehearsal run costs nothing.