Holiday auction fundraisers

December is when people think about children's causes without being prompted, and it is also when your organization is running the most campaigns it will run all year. Both things are true and the second one gets underweighted.

Count your asks before you add one

Most children's charities have, in the same six weeks: a toy drive, a giving-day push, a year-end appeal, and often a carol event or family day. Every one of those lands on substantially the same list.

Adding an auction without removing or moving something means five asks. The question worth asking in the planning meeting is not whether an auction would work in December — it would — but which of the existing asks it is competing with and whether that trade is worth making.

The case for moving it

An auction is one of the few campaigns you run that does not depend on seasonal sentiment. It works on the strength of the catalogue and the deadline, which you control. That makes it the most movable thing in the calendar, and moving it to spring or early autumn usually costs less than it costs to squeeze it into December.

A moved auction has one advantage the crowded one does not: it is the only thing you are asking for that month.

If you keep it in December

• Give it the shortest window that works — a week, closing well before the last posting dates and before year-end appeal week
• Make the catalogue giftable: experiences and objects a bidder can wrap or give
• Do not compete with your own giving day; sequence them a fortnight apart
• Use the drive's promotional material rather than making new material
• Close before the twentieth. After that, attention goes and delivery becomes a problem you did not need

Gift-oriented catalogue

A December auction has one real advantage: a bidder can be buying a present. That changes what belongs in it — experiences with a date in the new year, things that arrive quickly or need no shipping at all, and vouchers that can be printed and put in a card.

Say the delivery position on every item. A bidder buying a gift needs to know whether it will arrive in time, and an item that cannot is better described as a January treat than sold as a present that disappoints.

Whatever you decide, write it down

Put the whole seasonal calendar on one page with the audience for each ask, and keep it. Next year's team will otherwise rebuild the same crowded December from scratch, and this is the single most reusable thing this page can leave you with.

Pairing with the drive: toy drive plus auction.