Homecoming and reunion auctions

Homecoming and reunion weekends have everything an auction normally has to build: a date fixed a year ahead, a promoted audience, travel already booked, and a crowd in a nostalgic mood standing around between events with phones in their hands.

Coordinate with the alumni office, do not work around it

The weekend belongs to somebody, and they have a run of show, a list of what is already being asked for, and often an existing auction or raffle of their own. Two auctions on one weekend split the same crowd and both look amateur.

Ask three things early: may we run this, may it be promoted in the weekend materials, and is anything else soliciting these people across the same days. If there is already an auction, the productive answer is usually to contribute items to it rather than to compete.

Timing across the weekend

• Minus 2 weeks — bidding opens online, promoted through the weekend's own communications and any segment advancement will send
• Thursday/Friday — items visible wherever registration happens
• Saturday — the main crowd. Promote at the tailgate, the lunch and the reception
• Saturday evening — close during the dinner or reception, not after. Sunday is departures and nobody is bidding from an airport

Opening two weeks early rather than one matters here specifically: alumni who cannot travel still want to participate in their reunion year, and the auction is the only part of the weekend that works from four states away.

Reunion-class items

Making items specific to a class is what this weekend allows and no other date does.

• Archival photographs of that class's era, printed and framed
• A page from the yearbook of that year, or a reproduced piece of the student newspaper
• Memorabilia from the era: a pennant, a beanie, a menu, a ticket stub
• A named seat, brick or tree dedicated in the class's name
• Dinner with a professor who taught that cohort
• A room in the residence hall that class lived in

A reunion class will bid on its own decade in a way it will not bid on the institution generally. The archives will usually help, and a class-specific lot also gives the class committee something to rally around — which is free promotion from people already organizing their classmates.

On the day

• QR signage where people queue: registration, the tailgate, the bar, the dining tent
• One table with physical items, near where people gather rather than on a route
• A volunteer whose only job is helping people bid
• Announce the close twice, briefly, and never over a memorial moment or a class photo

Printable material comes from the items already entered: display sheets and catalogs.

Afterwards

Report the total to the class committees as well as to advancement, broken out by class where you can. A reunion class that beat the class below it will remember, and next year's committees will ask to take part.

What else belongs in the catalogue: item ideas that actually sell.