How civic organizations get items donated

For letter structure and follow-up, see how to get silent auction donations and the donation request letter template. In a small town the letter matters far less than who delivers it.

Build the relationship list at a meeting

The productive question is not "who will get donations?" but "who do you bank with, who did your roof, whose brother-in-law owns the garage, who is on your street?"

• Write down every business anybody has a relationship with, and who has it
• Assign each to exactly one member, in writing
• Record the outcome and keep the list for next year
• Nobody asks outside their assignment

This is the whole method and the thing that survives the membership. A group that writes it down keeps thirty years of contacts when a founding member stops attending; one that does not loses them.

Consider asking jointly

The move that most improves a civic organization's procurement. A business approached by one organization on behalf of five, for one auction, is being asked once instead of eight times.

Say that in the ask. It converts, and it is the reason the other groups will participate too: multi-organization events.

The order

1. Members

Skills, properties, hosting, handmade goods and labour. Members contribute before anybody solicits outside, so they can say so.

2. Businesses members personally know

Worked through assignments, tracked on one list.

3. Businesses the project benefits

The shops on the street getting the baskets, the businesses facing the park, the premises the lighting passes. A direct commercial interest, and rarely connected to the group by anybody.

4. The organization's own suppliers

The printer, the venue, the insurer, whoever does the flowers. Commercial relationships that are never asked.

5. Other community organizations

Reciprocal donation, promotion, and the possibility of a joint event.

6. The municipality

Not for money, but for permissions, promotion through its channels, and the town-connected lots only it can authorise.

7. The wider community

Standard, and last.

Give solicitors the half page

What the organization funded last year with figures and photographs, what this auction funds, what one unit costs, which entity receives, and whether donations are deductible — accurately, which requires having settled the status question.

Timing

• Twelve weeks — status settled; municipal approval for any project; joint arrangement agreed and signed if there is one
• Ten weeks — relationship list built and assigned; members contribute
• Eight weeks — businesses members know; businesses the project benefits
• Six weeks — own suppliers, other organizations, the municipality
• Four weeks — wider community
• Two weeks — catalogue closed; every public-property item has written agreement

Place it away from the town's other fixed events, which the same volunteers and the same businesses are already committed to.

General information, not legal or tax advice for your organization. Charitable status, incorporation and any agreement with a municipality are specific and consequential — an independent civic organization has no parent body to ask, which is exactly why this is worth one conversation with an adviser.

Committee structure: committee and volunteer roles.