How does mobile bidding work at a charity auction? QR codes, no app needed

Mobile bidding means guests bid from their own phones instead of writing on paper bid sheets. At modern charity auctions it works without any app or account: a guest scans a QR code, a web page opens, they type a name and a bid, done. What follows is how it works in practice, what you have to prepare, and the handful of things that reliably go wrong at real evenings.

The guest experience, step by step

• Beside each lot, or on each table, stands a card with a QR code.
• The guest points their phone camera at it. The lot page opens in the normal browser. Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for.
• The page shows the lot photo, description, estimated value, the current highest bid and the minimum next bid.
• The guest enters a name and email once, taps a bid, confirms.
• If someone outbids them later, they get a notification or email and can raise again from anywhere: their seat, the bar, the car park, home.

Why it beats paper bid sheets

Paper has three quiet problems. Guests have to walk back to the table to find out whether they were outbid, so most never do, and bidding dies after the first pass around the room. Handwriting creates disputes: was that 85 or 35? And at the close, volunteers decipher and total forty sheets by hand while guests stand waiting with their coats on. Mobile bidding removes all three. Every outbid guest is told at the exact moment they are most likely to bid again, amounts are unambiguous, and when the clock runs out the winners are simply known.

The ninety-second demonstration

Instructions from the stage do far less than one live demonstration. Hold up a table card, scan it on your own phone, place a €10 bid on the cheapest lot, and point at the big screen where it appears. Ninety seconds, no explanation of how QR codes work, and the room understands. Do it before the starter, not after dessert, because the first bid of the evening is the one that unlocks the rest.

Say two things while you are up there. That the email is only used to send them their invoice at the end, which is what people are actually hesitating about. And that they can bid from their seat — a surprising number of guests assume they must be standing next to the item.

What organisers need to prepare

• Connectivity. Guests use their own mobile data, so you need no wifi, but check the signal at the far end of the room and in the corner behind the pillar, not at the entrance where you happen to be standing. If the hall is a dead zone, get the venue wifi password and print it on every card.
• Printed cards. One beside each lot plus a general card per table. A6 is the practical minimum, with the QR at least four centimetres across, dark on a light background, matte rather than glossy. Glossy card under a spotlight is unscannable.
• A test print. Print one card as it will actually be produced and scan it from arm's length, in dim light, with an older phone. Almost every QR problem is caught in that thirty-second test and almost nobody does it.
• Roving helpers. Two per hundred guests, briefed to offer rather than wait to be asked.
• A fallback for the phoneless. One volunteer with a tablet can bid on behalf of anyone. In practice this is one or two people per hundred.

The card that faced the wall

A gala, lot 14, a framed photograph on an easel. At the twenty-minute mark a volunteer notices it has no bids while the two lots either side have seven each. The item is not the problem: the QR card was propped behind the frame, where the easel hides it, and nobody has walked round the back all evening. The card is moved to the front of the table and the lot collects five bids in the next quarter of an hour.

This is the single most common failure of a phone-based auction, and it looks exactly like a lot nobody wants. Give one volunteer the job of checking, twenty minutes after bidding opens, which lots still have zero bids. Eight times out of ten it is the card, not the item — face down, behind something, or in a corner where the light does not reach.

Does an older audience cope?

Better than most organisers fear. Scanning a QR code became universal during the pandemic years, and the bidding page asks for nothing harder than a number. What genuinely stops people is not the camera, it is the email field: a guest who is unsure why you want their address will simply put the phone down. One sentence from the stage about the invoice solves it. After that, what matters is the size of the text on your cards and the two helpers.

The edge cases worth deciding in advance

• An accidental bid. There is a confirmation step, but someone will still bid €500 with a thumb. Decide beforehand which single person may remove a bid, and let everyone else say "I'll fetch Anna".
• A flat battery at 22:00. Keep a charging point and a cable at the cash desk. It is a two-euro solution to a bidder who would otherwise stop.
• One phone between two. Couples share a device constantly. Let them bid under one name and sort the rest out at settlement; do not try to police it.
• Guests who leave early. They can still be outbid and still win. Say so out loud, and make sure the settlement email goes out regardless of who is still in the room.
• Last-second bidding. Without a soft close, a lot that gets a bid three seconds before the deadline produces the loudest complaint of the night. Extend any lot that receives a bid in its final minute by two minutes, and say that this is how it works before you open.
• Numbering. The number on the card, the number on the screen and the number in the programme must match exactly. One mismatch generates the whole evening's confusion.

Close in waves, and close early

Do not close forty lots at 22:00 at once. Close in three waves, twenty minutes apart, so the room gets three moments of tension instead of one and your helpers can deal with problems one wave at a time. And close while people are still there: 21:30 with dessert on the table produces more than 23:00, when a third of the room has already gone home and stopped watching their phones.

What it changes about the evening

Bidding stops being an errand and becomes a background game running all night. Guests bid from their dinner seats. Quieter people bid more, because nobody watches them do it. And the totals move in visible steps: thirty to sixty seconds after each wave of outbid alerts, the number on the big screen jumps, which the room notices and responds to. Organisers see every bid in one dashboard instead of on forty sheets of paper.

The same link also works for supporters who are not in the building, which is all a hybrid evening really is. For galas and charity dinners the practical steps are in getting started, and specific questions are answered in the help pages.