How scholarship funds get auction items donated

For letter structure, follow-up cadence and tracking, see how to get silent auction donations and the donation request letter template.

The order

1. Past recipients

The list to build if you do not have it. Ask for an item, a service from their business, or five minutes of their words about what the award made possible — the third is not an item but it will raise more than one.

If the fund has never kept contacts, start at this year's presentation and accept that the compounding begins now rather than a decade ago.

2. The presenting school or college

They benefit from the fund existing. Ask for the channel to promote the auction, an introduction to their own business supporters, and where appropriate an item — a reserved parking space, a seat at graduation, a tour.

3. Service clubs

Rotary, Lions, Kiwanis, Soroptimist and similar fund education as a matter of programme focus and are actively looking for projects with a named cost. An award is exactly that shape, and a club may sponsor one outright rather than donating an item.

4. Employers in the field the fund serves

A trades scholarship should be asking contractors and suppliers; a nursing scholarship should be asking health employers. They are recruiting from the same pool the fund is educating, which makes the ask commercial as well as charitable.

5. The family or organization the fund honours

Where the fund is memorial or named, that family's own network is frequently the largest single audience available and the most willing.

6. The high street

Last, for filler.

The ask writes itself

Education is among the easiest causes to raise for, and a scholarship fund has the clearest possible ask: a named cost, a named outcome, a real person at the end of it, and a selection process anybody can inspect.

The reason funds under-raise is almost never the pitch. It is that a small committee asks a small number of people, year after year, and never widens.

What to offer

The item listing, recognition at the award presentation — which is a genuinely nice thing for a local business to attend — a mention in whatever the presenting institution publishes, and a receipt from the entity that actually holds the fund, named accurately rather than assumed.

Timing

• Work back from the presentation date, which is fixed and public
• Ten weeks out — past recipients, the presenting institution
• Eight weeks — service clubs, whose meeting cycles are slow
• Six weeks — employers in the field, the honoured family's network
• Four weeks — high street gap-filling
• Two weeks — catalogue closed

Avoid the fortnight around application deadlines if the fund's audience is applicants' families — they are occupied with something more important.

Committee structure: committee and volunteer roles.