How long should a charity auction last?

Allow forty-five to seventy-five minutes of actual bidding inside a three-hour evening, sell twenty lots rather than forty, and stop on the total.

Shorter than you think. That is the honest answer, and it is the one most committees resist, because a lot of work went into collecting the lots and it feels wasteful to sell them quickly.

But an auction is not a concert. Nobody arrives hoping it will go on. The money is made in a fairly short window while the room is paying attention, and everything after that window costs you rather than earns you.

The short answer

As a rule of thumb, allow about forty-five to seventy-five minutes for the bidding itself. That is the block where lots are being called, prices are moving and people are watching the screen. Inside a whole evening of three to three and a half hours, that block is the smallest part.

If you are running lots over several days instead of in one room, five to ten days is the usual span, with the closing time on a Sunday evening. Longer than that and the middle of the period is dead air; shorter than a working week and half the people you invited never get round to it.

Everything below is about how to spend those minutes.

Why a long auction raises less

Attention in a hall runs down. It does not fall off a cliff, it leaks. Around lot twelve or thirteen people start talking to the person next to them; around lot eighteen they go to the bar; by lot twenty-five the only bidders left are the four people who came specifically for lot twenty-five.

The measurable version of this: in a long sale, the second half almost always makes less per lot than the first half, even when the lots are comparable. The room has not decided those lots are worse. It has stopped listening. So the practical rule is not "how long can we keep going" but "how many lots can we sell while everybody is still in the room".

For most halls that is twelve to twenty-five lots. Not forty. If you have forty donations, sell twenty and put the rest on a side table at a fixed price, or hold them for next year.

How much time a single lot needs

Not the same amount. Give every lot ninety seconds and you have built a machine that is too slow for the small lots and far too fast for the big ones.

Small lots, under a hundred: thirty to sixty seconds is plenty. Two bids and it is done.
Middle lots: ninety seconds to two minutes, which is roughly four or five rounds of bidding.
The two or three lots you are counting on: three to five minutes, and let them run over if they are still moving.

Serious bidding is slow. The record sales in the big salerooms take fifteen or twenty minutes for one lot, because two people are thinking between each raise. Your headline lot will not need twenty minutes, but it will need more than the sixty seconds you have pencilled in. If a lot is still getting new bids, do not close it because the schedule says so. If lots run on a countdown, allow the clock to extend when a late bid arrives; how an evening actually runs covers what that looks like on the big screen.

Where the evening actually goes

A shape that holds up for a hall of a hundred people, with about eighteen lots:

19:00 Doors. Drinks, lots on tables, codes next to each one. People wander and look. This hour is doing real work: it is when bids get decided.
19:45 Welcome, two minutes, no longer. Say what the money is for and say the number you are aiming at.
19:50 Sell one cheap lot as a demonstration, so everyone learns how bidding works while nothing is at stake.
20:00 First block, eight lots, about thirty-five minutes. Put your strongest object third or fourth.
20:35 Food. Half an hour. Leave two or three lots open on the screen so the total keeps moving.
21:05 Second block, ten lots, about forty minutes. Finish with the one everybody can win.
21:50 Read the total out loud. Then stop.

That is three hours from doors to total, with about seventy-five minutes of actual selling. The bar can stay open afterwards; the auction should not. The organiser's guide has the version with volunteers and jobs attached to each row.

If you run it over several days

Some groups cannot get everyone in one room, or want the bidding to start before the night itself. Both work, with two conditions.

The first is that you pick a closing time and say it in every message. Five to ten days is the usual window. Open on a Wednesday, close on a Sunday evening around eight or nine, when people are at home and on their phones. Do not close at midnight; the people you most want bidding are asleep.

The second is that you accept that almost nothing happens in the middle. Expect a burst on day one, near silence for most of the week, and the majority of the money in the last two hours. Plan your reminders around that instead of fighting it: one when it opens, one at the halfway point, one two hours before the close. Charities and galas often run both at once, with a few days of online bidding feeding into a live block on the night.

The last twenty minutes

This is the part worth protecting. However you structure the evening, the final stretch should have three things in it: a lot that many people can win, the running total visible to the whole room, and somebody saying the number out loud at the end.

The total is the reason people stay. If the screen says you are eleven hundred short of the target with two lots to go, somebody in that room will close the gap. If nobody knows where the total stands, nobody does anything. This is the one advantage a charity evening has over a professional saleroom, and it only works if you show it.

Then send the payment mails the same night, while people are still in the building and still pleased with themselves. A mail that arrives on Tuesday gets paid on Friday, or not at all.

Two things to check before you commit

Time one full run-through with a stopwatch. Not in your head, out loud, reading the lots as you will read them. Most committees discover their eighteen lots take fifty minutes rather than the twenty they assumed, or the reverse.

Then do it properly, with the real lots in and two phones bidding against each other, because a rehearsal tells you things a spreadsheet cannot. Building and testing the whole evening costs nothing until you open real bidding, which is also how company teams tend to find out that their forty lots were always going to be twenty.