International aid auction item ideas that actually sell

For the general list, see our 100+ silent auction item ideas. The distinctive categories are artisan goods and programme units — and there is a firm line on imagery.

Artisan goods

• Textiles, weaving, embroidery and basketry
• Ceramics, carving, metalwork and jewellery
• Coffee, tea, spices, honey and preserves, subject to food import rules
• Art by makers from the communities you work with
• A cooperative's full range as a single lot

Provenance, payment and import rules: artisan goods.

Programme units, priced locally

• A term or a year of one child's school fees
• A teacher's or health worker's salary for a month
• A well repaired, a latrine built, a water filter for a household
• A clinic's supplies for a week
• Seeds, tools or livestock for a family
• A cooperative's equipment, or a microloan fund contribution
• Training for a local staff member

Publish the real local cost. These figures are frequently small enough that donors assume they have misread them, which is the most useful reaction available.

Access to the organization

• A video call with the country director or a local partner
• A briefing for a donor's company or club
• Naming a well, a classroom, a scholarship or a cohort, where the community agrees
• A field visit, where the organization genuinely runs them — and only where it does

Field visits need care. Voluntourism and donor visits impose real costs on staff and communities, and an organization should not sell one unless it has a programme designed for it. Where it does not, a video call with a partner is honest and frequently more interesting.

Travel and the wider catalogue

Travel to the region from supporters and travel businesses, cookery classes in the relevant cuisine, language lessons, books by writers from those countries — plus an ordinary domestic catalogue, which is most of the lots.

What to refuse

• Images of people in extreme distress, anywhere in the campaign
• Photographs of identifiable individuals without consent that is genuinely informed and freely given
• Children photographed in ways you would not accept at home
• Anything sponsoring a named individual child in a way that publishes their identity and circumstances
• Wildlife products — ivory, shell, feathers, horn, restricted hardwoods
• Antiquities and cultural property
• Ceremonial or sacred objects
• A field visit the organization does not actually run

The named-child sponsorship point is worth stating. Whatever the merits of sponsorship programmes generally, publishing a specific child's name, photograph and circumstances as an auction lot puts a person who cannot consent into a transaction, and that is a different thing from funding a school.

General information, not legal advice for your organization. Sanctions screening, export and import rules for goods, and the regulatory framework for cross-border grantmaking are technical and consequential — your counsel decides how any of this applies.