Bloomerang Fundraising’s auction platform is built for silent auctions, using mobile bidding. For the best experience, we recommend that format.
But if you want your auction event to have a live component, you can still use Bloomerang Fundraising! This guide explains how to configure your item categories, enter bids in Bloomerang Fundraising, and finalize checkout for live bidding.
Contents:
Configuring Item Categories
Start by creating an auction category for your live items.
To ensure that attendees can’t bid on your live items in Givi or a web browser, we recommend toggling the Private Category option.
With Private Category enabled, any items in this category will only be viewable in the Virtual Terminal. This will also keep your items secret until live bidding begins.
If you want attendees to be able to view items in Givi or on the web before the auction, you can prevent them from bidding by using the Set a different bidding start date/time toggle and setting a date/time that begins after your planned live auction.
Note: We do not recommend allowing both live and silent bidding for a single item, so it’s important to either use the Private Category option or limit the bidding date/time.
To complete the initial configuration for your live auction, make sure to assign your live auction items to your new category.
Entering Live Bids and Opening Checkout
Conduct the live bidding however you want, making note of the winner and winning bid for each item. (Need help planning your auction? Check out these fun theme ideas on our blog!)
In order to charge the winning bidders the correct amount for their items, you'll need to adjust the winning cost once you open checkout for the category.
Note: You can only open checkout after an auction category has ended, so you’ll want to plan your category end time accordingly.
When bidding is complete and the item category has ended, navigate to the Checkout tab in your Auction Virtual Terminal.
When you click the Open Checkout button, a Checkout Review modal will appear. Because your live items won’t have any bids logged yet, you’ll be asked to review those items.
Click Review Items, and then select the Items with No Bids tab.
For each item, click Assign Winner.
A list of attendees will appear. Locate the winning bidder, and click Assign Winner.
Then, just type the winning bid into the box, and click Confirm.
Now when you Open Checkout for the category, all of the live items will have winning bids, and you can easily mark the winners as Paid.