How much can a hospice raise with a silent auction?

Short answer: volunteers and existing donors carry it, and memorial giving arrives on its own schedule rather than the campaign's.

Working it out from volunteers and existing donors

The warmest audience is one you may not solicit, so size against the groups you can approach.

• Volunteers, current and former — the largest group you can ask directly
• Existing donors, much of the file already memorial
• Professional partners: funeral directors, florists, estate attorneys, financial planners
• Families who previously gave and opted in, where enough time has passed

Memorial giving is the larger channel overall and it arrives on its own schedule rather than the campaign's. Plan the auction against the audience you can invite, and let tribute giving land wherever it lands.

What moves it

Volunteers

Numerous, trained, committed, and rarely asked for anything but hours. The largest reliably reachable group a hospice has.

Whether tribute giving has somewhere to land

A tribute item that exists year-round captures an impulse the campaign did not generate and cannot schedule: memorial and tribute items.

Funeral homes and professional partners

Directors, florists, estate attorneys and financial planners touch the same families and are almost never approached as partners.

Whether the tone was right

Not a soft factor here. A catalogue that reads as a gala in a community that associates the organization with a death in the family suppresses giving from exactly the people most inclined to give.

Setting the goal

Name a provision reimbursement does not cover, publish its cost, and report in the same unit — nights of respite provided, counselling sessions delivered. All of it aggregate, none of it identifying.

Goal and budget mechanics: fundraising goals and budget.

General information, not legal or compliance advice for your organization. Patient privacy obligations continue after death and depend on your own policies and funding conditions — your privacy officer and counsel decide how any of this applies.