How to write a lot description that gets bids

Most charity lots are sold by three lines of text and one photograph. Not by the auctioneer, who has thirty seconds on stage and cannot repeat himself twenty times. Not by the donor, who is standing by the bar. By the card on the table and the screen on the phone, which is where people actually decide.

Those three lines do a specific job. They tell a person who has had two glasses of wine what they get, what it is worth, and why they should want it before somebody else does. Most descriptions fail at the first of those.

The description is doing the selling, not you

Write every lot as though nobody will explain it. Somebody scans the code next to the lot, reads what is on their screen, and either bids or does not. There is no follow-up question, no sales pitch, no chance to add the detail you left out. If a reader has to guess, they guess low, or they scroll past.

This is the single biggest difference between a lot that raises fifty and the same lot raising four hundred. Not the item. The description. A weekend in somebody's cottage written as "Weekend away" makes fifty. The same weekend written with the village, the number of beds, the walk to the pub and the fact that the dog is welcome makes four hundred.

Start with what the winner walks away with

Open with the thing itself, in ordinary words, in the first six or seven. Not with the charity, not with a thank-you to the donor, not with a phrase like "an amazing opportunity to". Those go later, if at all.

• Weak: "A wonderful chance to enjoy a very special experience with our friends at the sailing club."
• Better: "Half a day on the water for four people, with a skipper, out of the town harbour."

The second version tells you how many people, how long, and where. Somebody reading it can already picture which four people they would take. That picture is what makes them bid.

Be specific enough to be checkable

Numbers, dates, names, sizes. Every vague word you replace with a fact raises the ceiling on the bidding, because vagueness reads as risk and people discount risk.

• Not "dinner for a group", but "dinner for eight, three courses, cooked in your kitchen".
• Not "a few lessons", but "six thirty-minute guitar lessons, at your house or hers".
• Not "a signed shirt", but "an away shirt signed by the full first team in March, framed, 60 by 80 centimetres".
• Not "sometime this year", but "any weekend between April and October, agreed with the donor".

If you genuinely do not know a detail, ask the donor before you write the lot. That one phone call is usually worth more than an hour of rewriting. Schools tend to have the hardest version of this problem, because a lot of the lots are promises from parents; the school auction pages go into how to collect those details without chasing people for weeks.

Say what is not included

Every description should carry the boring bit: what is excluded, when it expires, how it gets handed over. Not because it sells, but because it removes the reason not to bid.

Travel not included. Drinks not included. Valid for twelve months from the night. Winner collects from the school office within two weeks. Dates by arrangement, subject to availability. Four short sentences at the end, in the same size type as everything else.

People who are about to spend three hundred pounds of their own money in public want to know what they are on the hook for. Leaving it out does not make them forget the question; it makes them ask you at the payment desk, at half past ten, in front of a queue.

Put the donor in it

A charity auction is not a marketplace. Half the bidding energy in the room comes from the fact that everybody knows whose lot it is. Use that. Name the donor, and give one line in their voice about why they gave it.

"Marjan has run this bakery for nineteen years and has never taught anybody outside the family. She will teach you." That line is worth more than any adjective you can put in front of the word "opportunity". It also makes the donor feel properly thanked, which is how you get the same lot again next year.

Keep it to one or two sentences. The description is not a profile. If you want the longer version, put it on the back of the printed sheet or read it out from the front when the lot comes up.

Photographs count as description

One good photograph beats four bad ones. Take it in daylight, against a plain wall or a plain table, from the angle a person would actually see the thing from. For a promise rather than an object, photograph the person or the place: the baker in her kitchen, the cottage from the garden, the boat on the water.

Avoid stock images and avoid manufacturer press photos. They read as generic and they quietly tell the reader that nobody in your organisation could be bothered. A slightly imperfect photograph of the real thing does better, because it looks like it exists.

A shape you can reuse twenty times

Once you have written three lots, stop inventing and use the same skeleton for the rest. It keeps the sheet consistent, and it means a volunteer can write six of them in an evening.

1. One line: what the winner gets, with the number and the place in it.
2. Two or three lines: the detail that makes it real, including dates and sizes.
3. One line: the donor, named, and why they gave it.
4. Two lines: exclusions, expiry, and how it is handed over.
5. One photograph, taken by you.

That comes to roughly eighty to a hundred and twenty words. Long enough to answer the obvious questions, short enough to read on a phone while standing up. If a lot needs three hundred words to make sense, it is probably two lots.

Then test it. Put the lots in, look at them on your own phone the way a guest will, and read them cold the next morning. Setting the whole thing up and rehearsing it costs nothing, so there is no reason to see your descriptions for the first time on the night. Anything that made you hesitate on your own screen will make forty people hesitate in the hall.

Two last habits. Read every description out loud once; the sentence you stumble over is the sentence to cut. And write the descriptions before you set the opening bids, not after, because a well-written lot is worth a higher start than you first thought. The organiser's guide covers the rest of the running order, and the help pages deal with the edge cases, like lots with multiple winners or a donor who pulls out three days before.