Charity auctions: What you need to know

Learn about Givebacks' (formerly MemberHub's) auction options and how to customize them for your Experience.

Running an online auction may seem complicated, but Givebacks provides many tools and customizations to help your auction proceed smoothly and efficiently.

Types of Auctions

Givebacks offers two auction types: English style and proxy-bidding. Learn which type may be best for you in this Knowledge Base article: What’s the difference between an English style auction and a proxy-bidding auction?

Costs 

Givebacks offers a few different pricing options to help cover the costs of your fundraiser.

  • Our Pricing Page provides detailed pricing information.
  • Auction-only fundraisers must be run using our Advanced Pricing option.

Item Limits  

You can add as many auction items as you like, and you can customize how your items are organized.  

  • If you have a lot of items, consider putting them into categories so donors can quickly find what they’re interested in:  

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Promoting Your Auction 

Givebacks has tools to help you get the word out about your auction and make it easy for people to participate. 

Bidding Process  

Givebacks helps you manage all steps of the bidding process on one site.  

  • Donors bid directly from your Experience page.  
  • When donors place their first bid, they’re asked to enter their credit card information and create a Givebacks account. This makes it easy for donors to increase their bids later if they are outbid.  
  • Donors can bid as many times as they want on as many items as they’d like.  
  • Givebacks only charges the winning bidders after the auction ends.

Buy it Now

You have the option to let a bidder buy an item immediately if they don’t want to risk losing the item to another bidder. Buy It Now allows donors to skip the bidding process and purchase an item for a set price. Buy It Now can also be enabled or disabled at your preference. See this KB article to learn how: Can I add Buy It Now to my Auction Items?

Outbid Notifications  

Donors can choose to receive outbid and winning notifications by email and by text. 

  • Donors automatically receive email notifications when they’re outbid, but donors can also opt in to text notifications when they place their first bid and create their account: 

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  • Both email and text notifications include a link that allows donors to update their bids easily.  
  • If you choose to let our system notify the auction winners at the end of the experience, donors who opted in to outbid notifications will also receive a text notification for their win.

Tax-Deductible Receipts

Once the auction is completed, we charge winning donors’ credit cards and send them a receipt. If you include the auction item’s fair market value, the receipt also acts as a tax receipt. This KB article provides further information on fair market value and how it applies to tax deductions: How to designate ‘fair market value’ for auction items to appear on the winner’s receipts.

Additional Resources

  • Speak to our customer service team by emailing Support
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