Services/Live fundraising
The auction, the pledge and the games — run by the person who designed them.
One voice carrying the room from the welcome to the close. No handovers, no supplier who has never met your cause, and nobody improvising the most important ninety seconds of the night.
On the night
The live auction
Run to bank money, not to shift stock.
Lots are chosen and sequenced deliberately, reserves are set to sell rather than to protect somebody’s margin, and the storytelling does the work that a glossy catalogue cannot. Smaller donated items, run well, routinely outperform expensive bought-in lots, because the charity keeps all of it.
At one gala, paintings by schoolchildren raised £4,000.
The live pledge
The moment the evening is built around, and it comes straight after the auction, every time.
Here is why that matters. Ten lots in a room of two hundred people means ten winners. Only one person can win each lot, so a hundred and ninety guests reach the end of your auction having given nothing, not for want of willingness, but because there was nothing left to win.
A live pledge, sometimes called fund-a-need or a paddle raise — opens the giving to everyone. Structured in tiers, it reaches guests with real disposable income and guests who can only manage a little, in the same three minutes. Nobody is priced out. Nobody is left out.
It is also the only moment in the evening that is genuinely about the charity. The room gives to a specific, costed piece of your work, the message, the intention, the outcome — rather than to an object. An auction cannot get near that, because an auction is about the lot.
It is the part most charities are nervous about, and the part that most often out-raises the auction. At the Jigsaw Trust it brought in £30,600 against the auction’s £27,000. At another event it added £8,300 that would otherwise have gone through a marked-up auction and largely stayed there.
And because it is a genuine gift, it carries Gift Aid.
Straight after the welcome
The fundraising games
Quick, warm, and quietly profitable.
Heads or tails, the envelope game, casino and raffle elements — chosen for your crowd and placed where they do the most work. Usually that is early, before dinner. A room that has not eaten yet is a cold room, and games warm it far more effectively than anything said from a lectern.
They raise money in their own right, and they make everything that follows land harder.
Hosting is included, not sold
Compèring the evening, holding the running order, managing the energy: all of it comes with the engagement. It is how the strategy gets delivered, not a separate product with its own price.
The auctioneer is the proof, not the product
The strategy leads. But it is a strategy written by somebody who has stood in front of hundreds of rooms and knows what a plan does when it meets four hundred people, a late-running dinner and a bad PA.
Over £10 million raised across the UK, Europe and the United States.
Questions
Asked before every booking
What does a charity auctioneer actually do?
On the night: runs the live auction, delivers the pledge moment and the games, and holds the room’s energy across the whole evening. Here it goes further — the same person designed the evening months earlier, so the delivery matches the plan.
Do we need big-ticket lots to make it work?
No. That belief is what this whole brand exists to argue against. A well-chosen donated lot, run properly, banks more for the charity than a bought-in lot with a high reserve.
Can we book you just for the night?
The evening is sold as one engagement, because the total depends on decisions made months before anyone picks up a microphone.
Do you work outside the UK?
Yes — Europe and the United States, including a Monte Carlo gala that raised over €1 million in a single evening. Most work is UK-based.
No obligation, and never a percentage of what you raise
Let’s talk about your number.
Thirty minutes about your event, your room and your target.
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