St Ignatius College Riverview

Fundraising Gala

Increase in revenue: 185%

On 24th May St Ignatius College Riverview P&F Association held their annual gala ball and increased their fundraising revenue by a whopping 185% against their original target, based on previous years' revenue achieved on paper.

They launched their catalogue online 8 days before the live event, emailing a link to the auction out to their supporters so people could browse the catalogue, place bids and make donations before the ball. This resulted in 45% of their final revenue being secured pre-event and a much more engaged audience throughout the entire auction and donation process.  

Here's what Sue Boorne, a parent & Executive member of the Riverview P&F had to say about her GalaBid experience:

Sue what made you chose to work with GalaBid?

Pretty much from the word go I knew GalaBid was the right solution: it was very easy to use and I really liked the user friendly interface and the fact you could load your own pictures and item info. Using mobile phones is such a great way of doing things as it provides a whole event solution"

And what were the best parts of the fundraising platform?

From an organiser point of view loading multiple pictures and having formatted text were a big help to allowing our auction catalogue to look sleek.

Also having a fully electronic catalogue meant we could do away with our display tables as space was tight- this meant we fitted another 100 attendees as we didn't need auction tables.

But the main auction features were what really made a difference: not just silent auction but also being able to advertise live auction items ahead of the live event and communicate our bursary programme through the donation features included in the catalogue which helped to secure us extra fundraising revenue.  

Another benefit was the increase in donated items in the last week after launching.  Once parents saw the catalogue and started bidding thy got on-board and thought "I can donate to this".   The GalaBid site really helped build momentum in donation of goods as well as to the Bursary Programme.  This really set the tone for the evening.

Once the event got started many people had already decided which items they were going to continue to bid on.  Plenty of people spoken to were wanting to know "who is such and suchäó_they keep outbidding me!!?"  I really added to the fun of the event.

The range of ways to bid and the outbid SMS also made a big difference.

And how did your supporters respond?

Everyone really loved the solution it worked really well - all really positive feedback with people saying it was a fantastic idea.

You got a huge result from launching the catalogue ahead of the live event with 45% of your final revenue being captured before anyone even walked in the room! What are your thoughts on this?

Yes it made a huge difference - 350 bids were placed before the night. It also gave people the opportunity to register without having to think about doing that on the night. People are distracted at a live event so it's good for them to have already browsed the catalogue and started to bid on the items they are interested in.

We also had quite a lot of 'home bidders' i.e. people who couldn't actually make it to the live event. In fact 30% of our bids were made by non-attendees.  

It also meant on the night we can concentrate on fun rather than just fundraising - the technology did it all by itself.