Canada WHO
Founded in 1981, Eagle Valley Land Trust is a non-profit focused on conservation, operating in Colorado, USA. Through partnerships at a local, regional and national level, EVLT works to ensure that open spaces are protected for generations to come.
WHAT
Hoping to use the increased interest around environmental issues that occurs during Earth Week to raise funds for their conservation efforts, EVLT held only their second ever virtual auction. For 2020’s virtual auction, EVLT did not use Givergy’s platform and found the aesthetics to be poor and the user experience clunky. The 2021 virtual auction needed to be better, so EVLT switched things up and went with the Givergy platform to host their week-long auction.
HOW
As EVLT have a Givergy annual subscription, they knew they could organise an online auction within the fundraising package already in place. This gave them the flexibility to capitalise on Earth Week and run a more impromptu fundraiser. The auction itself was run over a week, during which EVLT held a different free event every day, drawing people in who would then get to see the auction.
RESULT
The 2021 auction surpassed EVLT’s expectations. Everything that they thought may sell did sell and their $10,000 fundraising target was achieved!
TOP TIP
“Digital auctions take time to curate but it is definitely worth spending time creating engaging descriptions and taking good photos of your items. These little things really do make a difference and if you put this effort in at the beginning, you will reap the rewards during the auction itself! Something else that helped was asking those businesses that had donated items to share the auction across their social channels. We thought that their audiences may be more interested in the items than our own database and this definitely turned out to be the case!”
“With this auction we wanted to demonstrate a level of professionalism that would impress our donors and result in more money raised. Working with Givergy certainly allowed us to achieve that. We thought that to achieve this it would cost the type of money that only the biggest charities can afford, but this simply isn’t the case. Our Givergy Unlimited annual subscription isn’t only affordable but it allows us to run as many smaller events and fundraising campaigns as we can organise throughout the year and this is definitely something we will be doing.”
