Silent auctions for Lions clubs, set up in minutes

Say the thing nobody else can say

Lions clubs conventionally maintain a strict separation between two accounts: administrative funds, paid by members through dues and covering the club's own costs, and activities funds, raised from the public and spent on service.

That means a club can say something almost no charity can: every dollar the public gives goes to service, because the members pay the club's own costs themselves.

It is a genuinely strong statement, it is true, and clubs say it to each other constantly and to the public almost never. Put it on the auction page, in the solicitation letter, and in whatever a volunteer says at a door.

• Confirm your own club's practice and your constitution before claiming it
• Keep the accounts genuinely separate, including the auction's own costs
• Where an expense must come out of the public account, say so rather than blur it
• And check your charitable status, which is not the same question — many clubs are not 501(c)(3) even where an associated foundation is

Vision is the cause nobody confuses with anybody else's

Every service club funds local good works, and to an outsider they blur together. Sight does not. The eyeglass collection box is one of the most recognised charitable objects in a town, and the connection between Lions and vision is genuinely established in public understanding.

Lead with it, cost it, and let it carry the campaign: vision and hearing programmes.

Twenty people are doing everything

The constraint shared across service clubs and the one that decides scope. A club's active membership is small, frequently ageing, and already running the pancake breakfast, the highway cleanup, the scholarship, the screening events and the meetings.

• Scope the auction to what the actual working membership can run, not the roster
• An online auction with no event is a complete campaign and needs no volunteers on a Saturday
• Replace a fundraiser rather than adding one — the calendar is already full
• Where a project needs more hands than the club has, partner with another club rather than declining: multi-organization events

A club that adds an auction on top of everything else and burns out four members has lost more than it raised.

Your town knows the name and not the work

Ask a resident what the local Lions club does and most will say something about glasses and then stop. The club has funded scholarships, screenings, camp places, hearing aids, park equipment and emergency assistance for decades, and almost none of it was ever published.

An auction is a reason to publish. Name what the club funded last year, with figures, on the campaign page — it converts the fundraiser and it fixes a recognition problem the club has had for thirty years.

Working it out from members' own relationships

A service club's reach is not a mailing list — it is the number of businesses each member personally knows.

• Active members, times the businesses each can genuinely approach
• Past attendees of the club's other events, if anybody captured them
• Other service clubs and civic organizations locally, which reciprocate

The full method: how much can a club raise?

When an auction is the wrong instrument

If it would be the fifth fundraiser on a calendar four members already run, replace something instead. If the club has no charitable status and donors will assume it does, settle that first. And if the project is district or foundation scale, apply for the grant — that is what it is there for.

Reaching a town that already knows you

Channel order: members' own networks, which is most of it; past donors and attendees of the club's other events; the businesses the club has bought from and worked with; other service clubs, which reciprocate readily; congregations and civic groups; the recipients' networks where appropriate; and local media, which covers service clubs warmly and rarely.

One move worth building in: the club's other events. A pancake breakfast, a duck race, a golf outing or a booth at a festival puts the club in front of hundreds of people who are not on any list. A sign-up sheet at every one of them, all year, builds the audience the auction needs.

General mechanics: how to promote a silent auction and marketing templates.

Recipient privacy is a real constraint

A club that funds glasses, hearing aids or emergency assistance knows exactly which families received them, in a town small enough for that to matter.

• Never name a recipient, publish a photograph, or thank a family identifiably
• Never publish a count small enough to identify — "we helped three families" in a village is a disclosure
• Report in aggregate: examinations funded, glasses provided, screenings held
• Keep the assistance decision away from whoever runs the auction, where the club is large enough to separate them
• Brief solicitors, because a member proud of the work will name somebody without thinking

The name and emblem

The association's name and emblem are protected and their use is governed by the parent organization. Merchandise, signage and anything produced for an auction should be checked against those rules, and the district can answer it quickly.

For a club whose signature cause is children and youth leadership rather than sight, the structure is the same and the emphasis differs: silent auctions for Kiwanis clubs.

General information, not legal or tax advice for your club. Account separation rules, charitable status and the use of the association's name and emblem come from your own constitution and your district — check both before fundraising.

Ten weeks, at the scale twenty people can actually run

• Week 10 — confirm the club's charitable status and the activities/administrative account separation, and write the accurate sentence for the page
• Week 10 — build the relationship list at a meeting and assign each business to one member; members contribute first
• Week 8 — members work their assignments
• Week 6 — the club's own suppliers; optometrists, opticians and audiologists; other service clubs
• Week 4 — past event attendees and the wider community
• Week 2 — catalogue closed; recipient-privacy check on every item and every line of copy
• Close + 2 weeks — report in services funded, in aggregate

Three jobs, for a membership that has none spare

• The assignment list — one asker per business, outcomes recorded, kept for the year after that member stops attending. This is the club's institutional memory
• Recipient privacy — one person reads every public word, because a member proud of the work will name somebody without thinking
• Scope control — somebody whose job is saying the auction is twenty items online, not a gala

Where service club auctions go wrong

• Adding a fundraiser to a calendar four members already run, and burning them out
• Never saying that public donations go to service, which is true and unusual and unsaid
• Assuming the club is a charity when many are not, and letting donors assume it too
• Naming a recipient, or publishing a count small enough to identify in a village
• Letting the relationship list live in one member's head until they stop driving at night
• Adding a raffle because it is traditional, without checking the gaming rules
• Producing emblem merchandise without checking the association's rules

What it costs, and the thirty-year recognition problem

Nothing but volunteer hours, which is precisely the scarce input. Scope accordingly.

Worth putting to a board: the town knows the club's name and the eyeglass box and almost nothing else. Decades of scholarships, screenings, camp places and quiet emergency help, essentially unpublished. Naming what the club funded last year, with figures, converts the auction and fixes a recognition problem the club has had since the 1970s.

After it closes

• Report in services — examinations funded, glasses provided, screenings held
• Write the relationship list into the club's permanent records, not a member's notebook
• Put a sign-up sheet at every club event for the rest of the year
• Thank the vision and hearing professionals publicly; they are partners as well as donors
• Agree next year's date now, in the same slot, because the compounding is the point