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      How to Conduct an Appeal

      This article will provide information on how to conduct an Appeal online and offline, create appeal items, and how to enter donations through the back-end.

      Whether you call it a Paddle Raise, Appeal, Direct appeal, Fund-A-Need, an Ask or Donation Moment, they all mean the same thing. This is a direct ask for your donors to support your organization financially. Throughout this article, we will refer to it as an Appeal. 

       

      Article Index

      To skip ahead, click on a section below.

      1. Appeal Flow Overview
      2. Conducting an Offline Appeal 
      3. Conducting a Live Digital Appeal 
      4. How to Create Appeal Items
      5. How to Enter Appeal Donations into Handbid

      Appeal Flow Overview

      The traditional method usually includes hiring a benefit auctioneer to conduct the Appeal in conjunction with a Live Auction (either before or after the appeal).  In many cases, the ask is to financially support the organization's cause. It's a beat practice to begin the Appeal once the Silent Auction has closed and in some cases, when the Live Auction is over. This is recommended because it will benefit you more, especially if the bidders had not won anything in the silent or live auction portions of the event. This will give them a final opportunity to support your organization.

      To set up an Appeal, you will create a series of donation levels in your Handbid site.  These levels correspond with the Appeal levels you and your auctioneer have established.  The auctioneer will start with the highest donation level (in most cases) and will continue down through the lower levels (e.g. $1,000, $500, $250, $100, etc).  At each level, your guests will be asked to raise their hand, paddle or bidder number to acknowledge their pledge of the amount. 

      As your auctioneer announces donation levels, it's important that you have volunteers and/or staff act as spotters. Spotters will write down the paddle numbers under a corresponding column on a sheet as the auctioneer is announcing the paddle/bidder numbers. The auctioneer will then call out these numbers with the bid amount.  These need to be written down so the pledges can be recorded and billed. 

      So how would you set this up in Handbid?  There are two ways.

       

      Conducting an Offline Appeal through Handbid 

      Using this method, rely on your benefit auctioneer to run the Appeal in the room.  Your guests will raise a paddle (or bidder number card) to acknowledge their donation. 

      To start, you need to determine donation levels with the auctioneer.  Once you have done this, you need to create an Appeal Item with the following parameters:

      • Name: Amount of the contribution (e.g. $250 Donation)
      • Price: Input the amount of the donation (e.g. 1000 - do not use special characters in this field)
      • Category:  If you don't already have a donation category, you can create a new category (i.e. Paddle Raise). Or, set as No Category (if you don't want to have them appear or hide them).

      You will need a team of volunteers to record the paddle/bid numbers at each level. Depending on how large your crowd is, we recommend you have a minimum of 2-3 people do this so that they can audit (check their entries) against each other prior to entering the donations into Handbid. 

      Once the list is validated, enter the donations in Handbid:

      1. Select the dollar sign icon at the top of the screen to open the Mass Appeals tool.
      2. Select the Donation amount you want to enter on the right side. The donation amounts will be represented by the appeal items you have added in Handbid. (Note: Your appeal items will need to be in an open status and not marked "Hidden" to display in the mass appeals tool)
      3. Select the bidder you want to add the donation for. You can search for the bidder by paddle number or name and either hit the green add button or enter/return on your keyboard to add the donation.
      4. Once you have added all of the donations at the selected level you will select the complete button to add the donations to your bidders/donors invoice. 
      5. You will see pop-up confirmations populate on the right side of the screen to represent all of the added donations. You may need to wait a second for the notifications to disappear before entering the next amount. 

      Can I do this on an iPad?

      Yes! Provided the Appeal items are in a category, you can enter these as well on the iPad app.

       

      Conducting a Live Digital Appeal in Handbid

      If you want to forgo the entry of contributions or, if you do not plan to have and auctioneer or organization member conduct the appeal in the room, you can still manage an Appeal digitally in Handbid.  Just follow the same instructions above to create the various Appeal levels and encourage people to use those items to donate from their phone or iPad (or web).  

      If you'd like to display visuals, you can show a live thermometer to highlight the donations being made in live-time.

       

      How to Create Appeal Items

      To create appeal items, follow the simple steps below: 

      1. Log in with your Auction Manager credentials, select your auction and go to the Auction Dashboard.
      2. In the Auction Dashboard, click on the 'Gift Box' icon in the tool bar at the top of the page.
      3. When the window appears, select the Appeal item type.
      4. In the item settings window, enter in:
        1. Item Name: For instance, "$100 Donation"
        2. Item Cost: Again, that would be $100, or the amount of the level you're creating.
        3. Category: You will either create a Appeal/Donation type category, or add it to an existing Appeal/Donation type category. Items must be in a category in order for them to be visible on the site.
        4. Add an Image if you'd like.
        5. Then proceed with item settings by deciding to enable or disable the checkboxes listed.
      5. Once you've completed the settings fields, click the green CREATE button to finish.
      6. These appeal items will appear on the BROWSE ITEMS and DONATE tabs on the front end.

      How to Enter Appeal Donations into Handbid

      Below are two different ways you can enter your paddle raise or appeals into Handbid. The first video is going to show you how to enter the information collected from a traditional paddle raise. In a traditional paddle raise, you will write down paddle numbers that correlate with a donation amount given

       

      The second video is going to show you how to do it through the mobile interface using the Handbid app to place the donations and Handbid TV to display the donations.