Last Wednesday, the club members who had a major part in planning our “Pay it Forward” event got together to celebrate and debrief. We were lucky enough to be joined by our auctioneer, Brian Bice. Brian is very experienced with working with Rotary auction events in other Clubs, and he brought us valuable words of advice.
The first thing he said was “Great job!” He thought the party was well planned and everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves. It was well attended, dinner was great (the SCC staff did a beautiful job), and it helped a lot that there was plenty of wine to drink. We all agreed that using the auction software was a big improvement over prior years.  The layout of the silent auction was well done. And, of course, the live auction was a ton of fun.
So, in many ways, this was our best fundraising event ever. We’ve put into place many valuable building blocks to achieve even more improvement next year. The organization of the event committees worked well, and we even have job descriptions.
Where could we improve? We are still concentrating too much of the work on too few Rotary Heroes. We had hoped to spread out the tasks among more volunteers, but this did not come together very well. Next time around, we need to start sooner. And we will find a way to tap into the connections and ideas that you, our members, can offer – to create more unique live auction packages.
With these few but very important improvements, next year we can substantially raise our net income. Who might benefit from this? Of course, our chosen major grant recipient would benefit. But also, the committees who focus on our other charitable work would benefit. Youth Exchange, would you like a bigger budget? How about you, International Committee? Literacy? Hands on? Rotaract and Interact? Other committees with a charitable focus? There is a lot more need that we could help fulfill if we brought in more revenue.  So we will encourage you to continue to support our single big fundraiser effort.
For all of you who contributed your time, talent, ideas and funds to our event: a sincere thank you! You made it great this past February, and I hope you are very proud of what we have achieved together.
Fellow Club members, your creativity and connections world-wide give us the potential to put together the most unique live auction packages you can imagine. If you have an idea to contribute, please share it right away with myself or with Fundraising Chair, Christian Bryant. It’s not too early to start building momentum for next year. Party on!