How much can a women's shelter raise with a silent auction?

Short answer: whether the goal was specific enough to carry the campaign on its own, since neither the building nor a survivor's story is available to help.

Revenue across domestic violence organizations

Working it out without a venue or a face

The sizing is ordinary; what is unusual is that neither the building nor a story is available to help.

• Your donor list and trained volunteer base
• Women's organizations, professional groups and service clubs in the area
• Employers with workplace programmes, who have a genuine reason to engage
• An average winning bid for a supporter base that skews toward professional households

Add one more input that is not a number: whether awareness month sits inside your window, and whether you are early, late or lost in the middle of it.

What moves it

How concrete and how small the goal is

A lock change, a new phone, a night of accommodation. Small, specific units do the work here that a story or a venue does elsewhere, because they are the only vivid thing the campaign is allowed to be.

Whether a partner venue hosted a closing event

An online auction with a hosted close at a hotel or a supporter's business reaches further than a shelter event could have, and removes the safety question entirely.

Awareness month positioning

Attention is available and so is competition. Being early or late in the month usually beats being in the middle of it: awareness month campaigns.

Whether advocacy staff reviewed the copy

Not a fundraising factor on paper, but a campaign pulled or corrected mid-flight because of an identification risk costs more than any tactic gains.

Setting the goal

Work from one defined piece of provision with a real cost, publish the figure, and report what it funded in aggregate — a number of lock changes, a month of hotline coverage, a count of relocations supported. None of it identifies anybody and all of it is more specific than most donors ever receive.

Goal and budget mechanics: fundraising goals and budget.