iBid Events bring auction technology to small charities
Howard Lake | 28 January 2015 | News
Although silent auction specialists iBid Events have helped raise over £20 million in 12 months at 650 charity events, the charities that benefit have mostly been medium to large organisations that can afford to pay for a live interactive charity auction.
Smaller charities, however, have not benefited, even though they run many fundraising events themselves.
That has now changed because iBid has developed a Single Page App (SPA) which makes the company’s technology available on a self-service basis. Smaller charities and even individuals can use the iBid Mobile to add an interactive auction to their fundraising events, at a considerably lower price than it would cost them to pay iBid to set up and run the event themselves.
Small charity auctions
Screenshots of iBid Lite
Charities using iBid Lite give guests or event participants a website URL via text, email or on the night of the event. They can use this to view and bid on lot items, receive notifications if they are outbid, pay for items they win once the auction has closed, make a donation to the cahrity, promote the auction to wider audience through social media, and explore information about the event, charity and sponsors.
Charities can grant access to guest before the event to help get the bidding started before the event, to maximise the amount raised.
In fact, charities do not even have to run a physical event to use iBid Mobile: they can use it simply to run an online auction.
Back-end for charities
iBid Mobile is a “mobile version of the full iBid product”, according to the company. As such, it provides the charity with a back-end event management system (EMS), so that it can present the auction content in the style of its own brand, set up multiple events, update lot items, and receive live reports throughout the auction on the amount being raised.
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About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.