Every trip on the table, costed before the bidding.
Mission First Fundraising supplies travel and experience packages to charity auctions: a week in Cabo, a golf weekend, a night on Broadway, each at a set cost and paid for only if it sells. We built their website and the platform inside it, where a nonprofit, a foundation or a benefit auctioneer builds an event's whole lineup and sees the cost, the likely sale price and the return on every trip before the night. We have run their search since.
“Fuel great causes in our communities by providing travel experiences with a proven rate of return for charities and nonprofits.”
A catalog a gala committee can shop in an evening.
The people choosing auction items are volunteers and development staff with a date on the calendar and a room to fill. They are not travel agents. They need to see what is on offer, what it costs them and what it tends to sell for, without a sales call for every question.
So the site opens on the trips, fifteen kinds of them, from beach and all-inclusive to sports, family and group travel, each a photograph and a door. Behind every one is a trip page written for the auction: what the winner gets, the terms and blackout dates, a spec sheet for the auctioneer, and the numbers a committee needs. How it works takes six steps, and the first is a free account.
Cost, price and return, on every trip.
Before this, putting trips into an auction meant a spreadsheet: the trip, where it runs on the night, what it costs the charity, what it usually sells for, how many might sell. The auctioneer had one copy, the committee another, and the numbers were out of date the day somebody changed their mind.
We built that spreadsheet into the site. Every trip page shows the cost to the nonprofit, the average sale price and the return, and one button adds the trip to an event, placed where it will run: live auction, silent auction, raffle, golden ticket or paddle drop. The event portfolio adds it all up, and a trip that does not sell costs the charity nothing. Below is a sample event built from their catalog. Change what sells and watch the return.
The night ends, and nobody opens a spreadsheet.
The work after an auction is where a charity loses the evening's goodwill: chasing winners, matching invoices, telling a vendor which trips sold. Mission First processes the winners, and the platform hands everybody the part they need.
Results go into the event after the night and the reports come out of it: an event summary, a vendor report, a trip report and the invoice, which downloads from the closed order. Every event syncs to their Salesforce as its own opportunity with its trips attached. An auctioneer sees every open event across the nonprofits they work with, and a charity can run more than one event at a time and amend an order until it closes.
Found for what a committee searches.
Nobody looking for auction items searches for a company name. They search for charity auction travel packages, consignment trips and no-risk auction items, and the answers are directories and the companies that have been at it longest.
So the search work runs alongside the build: pages for what each kind of buyer is looking for, trip pages written in a committee's words, and the housekeeping that keeps Google reading a catalog that keeps changing. In a year, the searches the site ranks in the top ten for grew more than fifteenfold, visits from search rose by half, and more of those visitors added a trip.
- +1,450%searches ranking in Google's top ten
- +50%visits from search
- +35%trips added to cart
What the platform keeps track of.
Built in stages since launch, and still growing. Each of these is live on the site today.
- Cost, sale price and return on every tripOn the trip page, before anything is added, in the three lines a committee will be asked about.
- Placed where it runs on the nightLive auction, silent auction, raffle, golden ticket or paddle drop, chosen as the trip goes into the event.
- One portfolio per event, several events at onceA charity can run more than one open event and amend an order until it closes. An auctioneer sees them all.
- Every event a Salesforce opportunityThe event and its trips sync to their Salesforce, so their team works from the same record the charity does.
- 15kinds of trip in the catalog
- 6steps from a free account to the summary report
- 4reports out of every event
A rate of return is a number, so show it.On every trip, for every event, before anybody raises a paddle.
Nobody buys a plan they haven't seen.
The free audit is a look at what you already have and what it is costing you, sent over with nothing to sit through. The plan is a conversation about where the business is and where you want it to get to, and it ends with a path written down rather than a quote. Or you call, and somebody who works on accounts picks up.