Fund Raisers I Have Known- Part 2

I did three years in a row at the Fairburn Elementary Spring Fair and Silent Auction. I described the first year a little. The same group of people did it with me. My Silent Auctions brought in 10K every year for three years. I tried fine tuning the process, worked on my mailing lists (you sent come on letters to known contributors and they mailed you back things) You hit up people you knew, like hairdressers and handymen. You sent out good-looking moms to solicit for you, I said every year, if I had just two or three gorgeous moms out there asking, I could make 20K easy. There were a few. One year a lady just would randomly ask and she had a gift. She'd walk in with a violin, then a CD set, then a fine art print. The school was 5 blocks from Westwood Boulevard, a main street lined with businesses that leads into UCLA. I walked the street and stopped in every store front on both sides of the street for a mile stretch. Really got very little. Just a couple of shops that continued to give every year. I sold the kids' artwork back to their parents. Sold front row seats in the auditorium for school functions. Discovered that I could get $500.00 a pop from big corporations, just by putting the right documents together in a packet. (I suggested, after I discovered this process, that we stop doing the Fair and just write letters with the proper documents to big corporation and earn our yearly budgets that way. No one wanted to try it.) Some of the dads would come and sit with me the day of so they could take credit even though they did very little. One of them volunteered to help me close up the auction and mark all the high bids so that bidders could back and collect what they won to pay for them. I'd circled the high bid with a big red marker and initial it. It turned out he only wanted to do it, so he could put down a higher bid and mark it and buy it himself.
 
There was a school down the street from us that was a Charter School and had much wealthier parents and early on I found out that they had been given a Jeep Cherokee to auction off. I tried for three years to get a car donated but never did. Not even an older clunker.

When my two main partners in the fair retired, I did too. I've been told the school has never seen the likes of my auctions since. But we are all replaceable.