The method
The Banked Method
Four phases, one number. Designed months out, delivered on the night, and measured by what reaches the charity’s account — not by what gets shouted from the stage.
The number, agreed before anything else is decided.
Every other decision hangs off this one, so it is made first and it is made together. The charity controls things we do not: the guest list, the table sales, the strength of its own story. We control the design of the evening and its delivery. The agreement says plainly which is which.
We also agree what we are counting. Not the figure announced from the stage — the figure that lands in the account, by a named date.
The evening, built backwards from what your charity actually does.
Most events are designed forwards, from supply. What can we get donated? What might people bid on? Fine — that is the evening. We start at the other end: what does a pound of your work actually buy, and what will move this room, on this night? Then every mechanism is chosen to point at that — the giving mix, which lots earn their place, whether each pound arrives as a purchase or a gift, and the running order. Which brings us to the part that matters most.
One voice, from the welcome to the close.
The person who designed the evening runs it. No handover, no supplier meeting your cause for the first time in the car park, and nobody improvising the most important ninety seconds of the night. Plans meet reality — a late-running dinner, a bad PA, a room colder or warmer than expected. Knowing when to hold the plan and when to move is the part that cannot be written down in advance, and it is why the strategist and the auctioneer are the same person.
The part almost nobody designs.
The gap between announced and banked is where most of the loss happens, and it is entirely avoidable. Payment taken on the night, not chased for a fortnight — card-on-file, Apple Pay, one tap. Gift Aid declarations captured at the point of giving, while the guest is still in the room. Lots collected and accounted for. Thank-yous that go out while the evening still means something.
Then the part that pays for itself: the guests who gave tonight are set up to give again — regular giving, the donor wall, a reason to come back. This year’s guests become next year’s donors instead of a list you start from scratch.
Inside phase two
The Giving Curve
A fundraising evening has a shape. The room’s attention rises and falls, and every giving moment either rides that or fights it. The Giving Curve is how we map it — and the logo you see on this page is the curve itself.
Games before dinner, not after
Their job is lifting a cold room — and a cold room is what you have before people have eaten. Most events play them after dinner, on a room that no longer needs them.
Dinner is the selling window
Energy dips, and that is fine. Raffle tickets go round the tables and the silent auction gets pushed — both work without the room’s full attention, which is exactly why they belong here.
The raffle draw holds the room
Drawn right at the end, deliberately. Anyone holding a ticket stays to see it — so the room does not quietly empty during the entertainment. The giving happened at dinner; the draw keeps people in the building.
Phase two, in practice
Games lift a cold room — so they come before dinner, not after.
Why the pledge always follows the auction
Because a live auction, by its own design, only lets a handful of people give.
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, every one of whom walked in willing to give, reach the end of the auction having given nothing at all. Not because they did not want to. Because there was nothing left for them to win.
And an auction drifts towards the object. After a few lots the room stops thinking about the charity and starts thinking about the thing: what is it, what is it worth, do I want it. That is what an auction is for. It is also why an auction can never carry the evening on its own.
The pledge answers both problems at once.
It is inclusive by design. A well-structured pledge runs in tiers — a high tier for guests with real disposable income, and tiers well beneath it, down to a level anyone in the room can reach. Two hundred people can all give, each at their own level, inside the same three minutes.
It is about the charity. A pledge leans entirely on the message, the intention, the outcome and the purpose — what the money does, and who it does it for. An auction cannot get near that, because an auction is about the lot.
And the auction has just done the hardest part of setting it up. It has put paddles in hands, made giving visible and communal, and shown the room out loud what generosity looks like. The pledge then invites everyone who was watching to do the same.
The auction shows the room what giving looks like. The pledge lets all of them do it.
Run this way, the pledge routinely out-raises the auction before it. At the Jigsaw Trust it brought in £30,600 against the auction’s £27,000. And because it is a genuine gift it can carry Gift Aid — worth 25% more to the charity than the same money spent on a lot.
Left to the end of the night as an afterthought, it raises a fraction of that. The order is not presentation. It is the strategy.
No obligation — and never a percentage of what you raise
Let’s talk about your number.
A conversation about your event, your room, and what the night should be raising.
Book a discovery call→