Do you enjoy volunteering your time for a good cause? Are you passionate enough about a specific charity that you would be willing to lead a campaign to raise them money? If so, you might want to consider planning a charity auction. Auctions that are well planned and offer fun and exciting items are a great way for people to generate both money and awareness for those causes they feel the strongest about. This guide will provide you with all the necessary information on how to plan a charity auction.

Once you have been designated to lead and plan a charity auction, you need to appoint a committee to help you. The amount of people you need on the committee will depend on the size of the auction you intend to plan, but you will want to make sure you have enough people to cover all the different areas. This includes putting someone in charge of:

1. Securing a venue to hold the auction
2. Finding entertainment
3. Decorations and gift bags
4. Handling the budget
5. The food
6. Advertising
7. Determining who to invite and handling invitations
8. Hiring the auctioneer

You may want to consider forming your committee a year in advance. This will give you plenty of time to arrange for everything, and give you extra time for acquiring the appropriate items to auction off.

Once the committee has been formed, you should create a realistic budget for the event. Keep in mind that you will be making some of this money back in the price of the tickets, but you will likely still be out of pocket, which will have to be offset by using some of the money you raise during the auction. Keep this in mind, as well as how much money you have available to you to start. Although you will be paying this back after the auction, or when tickets begin to get sold, you still need to determine the initial amount of money you must have on hand to put together a decent party.

Set a realistic fundraising goal, keeping in mind initial expenses versus ticket revenue. If you will need to generate $1,500 dollars to pay back the initial overhead, then in order to meet a fundraising goal of $10,000, you will actually need to make $11,500.

Finding the auction items is one of the most important part of the entire planning process, so the more time you have to procure interesting items that people want to bid on, the better chance you will have at success. Before starting this process, however, you may want to consider themes or types of items. You can even arrange auction categories based off the type of charity you are raising money for. An example would be if you were raising funds for a hospital, you might want to auction off dates with single nurses or doctors at the office, or try and get medical supply stores to donate items in their store. In finding items to auction, consider:

1. Asking people involved in local schools and churches
2. Putting information online, requesting donations. This could be on message boards, in chat rooms or on websites like Craigslist.
3. Calling people and companies directly, especially if you can tie them into the auction's theme

Publicizing your event is important, because the more people that attend, the more chance you have to get higher bids on your auction items. Once you have most of the event details worked out, you should be able to start promoting the event by doing some of the following:

1. Putting up event fliers at local stores, restaurants and related places
2. Advertising the event online. You can go on message boards, chat rooms and other related places.
3. Send out evite information to people
4. E-mail
5. Contact your local radio and television stations about possible mentions on air

If you are a natural when it comes to promoting ideas and causes to the general public, and you have a charity that you are interested in raising money for, then why not plan a charity auction? With a lot of hard work and planning, you can raise a nice pile of cash to support all those causes you feel strongly about.