How much can a travel team raise with a silent auction?

Short answer: how far past the roster you reached, and whether employers were asked about matching.

Working it out past the roster

Twelve to eighteen families are not an audience — their networks are.

• Extended family across the whole roster: grandparents, aunts, uncles
• Parents' employers, and how many run matching or community sponsorship programmes
• Hotels, restaurants and businesses that gain when you travel or host
• The itemised bill: a tournament entry, a hotel night, referee fees, a uniform set

Do not include the team's own families in the arithmetic. They have already written a substantial cheque and are budgeting for hotels, and an auction aimed at them is a third ask into households at their limit.

What moves it

Extended family

The multiplier, and the group with no bill. One line in a team email asking every family to forward an item to five relatives changes the arithmetic more than any procurement.

Employer matching and community sponsorship

Travel families frequently work at companies with matching programmes or local sponsorship budgets, and most teams have never asked a single family.

Tournament-weekend businesses

Hotels and restaurants gain substantially when a tournament comes to town, and they are rarely connected to it: tournament and travel costs.

Whether the ask was assistance or hotels

Supporters outside the team give to keep a child in the sport more readily than to fund a tournament weekend, and both can be true at once.

Setting the goal

Itemise and publish: a tournament entry, a hotel night, a uniform set, a scholarship place. Then report against the same list. An outside supporter has no idea what any of it costs and finds the itemisation genuinely informative.

Goal and budget mechanics: fundraising goals and budget.

General information, not legal or tax advice for your team. Whether your club is for-profit, a charitable organization or a booster group attached to one changes what a donor may claim and what you may do with the money — this is exactly the situation to put in front of your own adviser.