How Boys & Girls Clubs get auction items donated

For letter structure and follow-up, see how to get silent auction donations and the donation request letter template.

The board is the procurement plan

Clubs are unusually board-driven for a youth organization, and a Club board is typically business people who joined understanding that fundraising is part of it. The failure is rarely unwillingness — it is that nobody asked them specifically.

• Ask each board member for three named businesses, not for "help"
• Give them a one-page leave-behind and the member-year figure
• Have them donate first, so they can say so when asking
• Track it on one list so two board members do not approach the same business
• Report back at the next board meeting, by name

Then the order

2. Corporate partners

Already committed and already engaged. Ask for an item, a match, and — the one usually forgotten — their internal channel to reach employees, who are a far larger audience than the company itself.

3. Alumni

Adults who attended the Club as children. The most credible voice the organization has, mostly uncontacted, and worth building a list of even if this year's produces twenty names. Ask for an item, a donation, or five minutes of their words.

4. Service clubs and congregations

Both fund concrete provision with a named cost, and a member-year is exactly that shape. Ask to present as well as to donate.

5. Employers of staff and volunteers

Matching gift programmes, which a Club's staff and volunteer base frequently sits inside and nobody has ever asked about.

6. The community

Restaurants, retail, experiences. Standard, and last.

Brief solicitors on what may be said

Anybody asking will be asked about the young people, and a volunteer without prepared language will improvise a story. Half a page: what the Club does, the member-year figure and its basis, that nothing identifying may be said about a member or a family, and the aggregate numbers to use instead.

What to offer

The item listing, recognition at the event and in the newsletter, a receipt from the local Club named accurately — and, for a business, a photograph of the programme or equipment their donation funded. The building photographs well and nobody has to be in it.

Timing

• Ten weeks — board assignments made; each donates first
• Eight weeks — corporate partners, with the internal channel ask
• Six weeks — alumni, service clubs, congregations
• Four weeks — community and gap-filling
• Two weeks — catalogue closed; every facility item scheduled outside programme hours and described that way

General information, not legal advice for your Club. Affiliate obligations, brand standards and youth protection requirements come from your national organization and your own policies — your executive director and national contact decide how any of this applies.

Committee structure: committee and volunteer roles.