A local charity in St Louis is holding an auction this week and they brought in an auctioneer from out of town to do the auction. Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for charities flying in auctioneers if the want to, in fact my wife and I have been flown in to do auctions ourself. But what I do not understand is when I saw that the auction was advertised online, there were no details about what was for sale at the auction etc. The auctioneer put a link to his website for more details, I went to his website and there was not only no additional details on the auction, there was not mention of the auction at all. If your Charity Auctioneer dosen't put your auction on his website (or worse yet dosen't have a website) it may be in your organisations best intrest to look for a new auctioneer.
A website is as neccessary to conducting business today as a cell phone an auctioneer without either of these tools may as well go without a sound system (by the way if he doen't have one of those it is a very bad sign too). He should put the details of the sale online; date, time, place, what you are selling, pictures etc. and if he dosen't you are only getting a part of the money for your sale that you should get. You should ideally get your auction online at least 3 months before the day of the auction, and anything less than 1 month online is to little. Put as many details about your sale as you can. Does your auction have tickets? Then include the game day, time and seat numbers, if you can include a map of the venue. Most cities have seating charts online for major venues, have your auctioneer put that information online for you. If you can't get this level of support from your auctioneer perhaps you aren't paying him or her enough. If you are "hiring" an unpaid auctioneer, you can't expect much in support work. But then again if you don't get the support work you are most likely selling your items at a lower price than you could have sold them for. As time gones on this will only become a bigger problem for you. Your older bidders at your charity may not even own a computer while the younger bidders might we able to look the auction up on their cell phone. Your orginization ignores younger bidders at it's own peril. And don't think for a minute that younger bidders are not using the internet for almost everything
