Mentor recognition event auctions

Most programmes run a mentor recognition or appreciation event. It has a date, a venue, an audience of screened committed adults and their guests, and a mood of genuine goodwill. An auction attached to it inherits all four.

But the evening is theirs

The risk is obvious and worth naming to a committee: an event held to thank volunteers that turns into an event asking them for money has done something unpleasant, and mentors notice.

Three rules keep it right.

• Recognition first and at length. The awards, the thanks, the speeches are the programme; the auction is beside it
• One announcement, short, and not from the podium during recognition. Before the programme starts or at the break
• Mentors are guests, not targets. Do not seat them beside donors, do not ask them to promote lots, and make it comfortable to bid on nothing

The auction's real audience at this event is the guests, the sponsors, the board and the employers in the room — not the volunteers being thanked.

Open online well before

Two weeks, and promote it to the whole supporter list rather than only to attendees. That does most of the raising away from the room, which is precisely what keeps the evening about the mentors.

It also reaches former mentors who no longer attend, which is the audience the recognition event itself has stopped serving.

If mentees attend

Some programmes bring matches to the event. That changes the evening substantially and the auction has to change with it.

• No photography of the room without a plan agreed with your safeguarding lead
• No lots displayed with mentee-related imagery, which there should not be anyway
• No alcohol lots, and reconsider alcohol at the event
• No announcements naming bidders, and no public leaderboard
• Keep the auction physically to one side, not through the middle of the room

If in doubt, run the auction entirely online for that event and close it the following day. Nothing is lost — the bidding was mostly online anyway — and the evening stays what it was meant to be.

The one lot that belongs at this event

Something that funds mentors rather than being sold to them: a training cohort place, a mentor welcome pack, the background checks for the next intake. Naming it from the podium as the thing the room is funding for next year's mentors makes the auction part of the recognition rather than a departure from it.

Afterwards

Report the result to the mentors as well as to donors, in matches. A volunteer who learns that the evening they were thanked at also funded three new matches has been given a good reason to come back.

General information, not safeguarding or legal advice for your organization. Youth protection obligations depend on your affiliation, your funding and your state — your own safeguarding lead decides how any of this applies.