Organize your team

Making the most of the available resources is a key to success. Bluesky's role-based system tailors web pages to support each user's activities. Simplifying the interface for more casual users will get them up and running faster. As team members are able to take on additional responsibilities, you can simply add roles to their profile.

Choose your venue

You can run a live event or use Bluesky's new eBay Integration to run an online auction.

Bluesky makes it easy to run both live and online auctions as well, giving you tools to partition your items accordingly.

Want to run an online auction for all of the items that did not sell during your live event? No problem, Bluesky makes it easy to re-target those items for an online auction on eBay.

Regardless of the venue(s) you've chosen, Bluesky will always present the results of your auction(s) in a consistent manner. Creating and editing your auction items, determining starting bids and buy-it-now values and all reporting are approached in a uniform manner, affording you the most flexibility when deciding how to structure your events.

Leverage your team's skills and assure a high degree of quality when listing your items on eBay. Bluesky gives you tools to ensure that items are being listed with the proper shipping, return policies and starting/ending times.

Provide your audience with a robust Catalog browsing tool that can selectively filter your auction items by venue. Our browser serves as the perfect front-end to an eBay auction, giving you the community-based experience you're looking for.

Solicit donors

With Bluesky Auction, you can actively assign Donors to your available Solicitors or allow Solicitors to pick the donors they wish to approach. Bluesky keeps you organized by making sure that a donor can only be assigned to one solicitor at a time.

A solicitation toolset helps you manage your solicitation team. You can track the solicitation activities and, most importantly, identify prospective donors that have not been contacted by anyone.

Bluesky also provides you with tools to help you generate solicitation letters. Greeting rules and prior auction donations associated with each donor give your letters a more personal feel.

Your Solicitation Letters can be generated directly from within the Bluesky web application. You can choose to create hard-copy letters or send your solicitation letters via e-mail. E-mail can be monitored so that you will know if your solicitation letters are being viewed.

Donors can log into Bluesky with our new Donor Self-Service page. Embed a link in your soliciation e-mails (or provide login instructions with your hard-copy letters) and your Donors will then be empowered to make pledges online. Powerful tools allow donors to replicate prior auction donations, update their contact information and control their privacy settings. Your solicitors will be notified via email when donors make pledges using their self-service page.

Manage your donation inventory

With the donation editing toolset, Bluesky gives you the option of adding a quality control layer to your donation database. As donations come in, your team can just focus on entering them into the database. Donations can later be reviewed by an editor. Once donations are marked as edited, they become available to the catalog and bid-sheet functions. A bulk editing tool allows your editor to view and edit multiple items in spreadsheet-fashion.

Entering and editing donation data is time consuming. Bluesky Donor history is maintained so that prior year auction items (including associated photos) can be copied into the current auction eliminating redundant data entry. This can become a big time saver for future auctions.

Bluesky Auction comes equipped with sophisticated search capabilities making it easy to get at your donation data. You can build filters to allow you to view only the data you're interested in. Searches and filters can be saved and re-used and reports can be generated and emailed to interested parties.

Register your guests

Bluesky Auction provides you with several avenues to register your auction guests. Guests can pre-register themselves through public facing web-pages; Bluesky users can pre-register their own guests; or guests can register at the event. Bluesky Auction allows guests to be linked to members of your organization in case follow-up is required after the auction.

Use Bluesky's new Ticketing and Registration tools to automate most of the registration-related tasks. Sell multiple types of admission and sponsorship tickets to the event. Schedule different ticket types to be available at different times (eg. "early bird"). We integrate with PayPal so that e-payments are automatically recorded with your guest records. Alternatively, you can configure our ticketing services to allow for "offline" payments at the door.

Publish and auction catalog

Before your event, you can entice your guests and create "buzz" around certain auction items by publishing an on-line browsable catalog. With Bluesky, you can specify which donation categories to include and identify "featured" donation items to be displayed prominently. From within the catalog, you and your guests can send emails regarding specific auction items and build a wish-list. As updates are made to your donation database, you can refresh your catalog with the click of a button. Don't worry; auction items that have not been approved by your editing team are not included in the catalog.

Create and print bid sheets

The tedious process of creating bid sheets is greatly simplified with Bluesky Auction. To get you up and running quickly, you can simply specify starting bid percentages and increments at the donation category level. Then, you can tweak bid algorithms for individual items. Bluesky's sophisticated search tool allows you to pull up similar auction items and work on them together.

Bluesky Auction supports a variety of bidding methods (silent, live, fixed and sign-up.) Items can also be bundled into a package that shares a single bid-sheet.

Check-in your guests

Once your guests arrive at your event, you will want to get them checked-in quickly so they can begin enjoying themselves and, most importantly, bidding on items. Bluesky Auction helps you avoid those long check-in lines with an efficient check-in user interface and by providing many avenues to pre-register your guests.

Enter your winning bids

Running a smooth auction hinges on being able to enter your winning bids efficiently and accurately. Bluesky Auction's bid entry interface and workflow is designed with these goals in mind. You can scale your data entry team up as needed and avoid costly mistakes on your invoices through Bluesky's auditing function. With Bluesky, auditing can be handled by a separate team so that you don't have to compromise efficiency for accuracy.

Generate invoices

Once all of your winning bids have been entered and audited, you can generate invoices for your bidders with the click of a button.

Choose between e-mail and hard-copy invoices, or use a combination of both. When sending invoices via e-mail, you can include a Payment Button in the e-mail. With this option, your guests can make their payment without having to wait in a checkout line. In addition, Bluesky will automatically record the e-payment once it has been completed, so there will be no problems when your guest goes to collect their items.

For hard-copy invoicing, Bluesky Auction provides you with flexibility to generate all invoices at once, in batches or individually. Hard-copy invoices are generated in pdf format.

Check-out your guests

As your auction draws to a close, it's time to check-out your guests, collect payment and give them their winnings. Long check-out lines are all too familiar at auctions, but with the help of Bluesky Auction you can check out your guests efficiently. Bluesky Auction allows you to correct and print invoices on the spot.

Show your appreciation to your donors

After your auction, you will want to thank your donors for their contributions. Bluesky Auction makes this easy for you with a set of tools to generate and print all of your thank you letters. Greeting rules and current auction donations associated with each donor give your letters a more personal feel.

Your Thank-you Letters can be generated directly from within the Bluesky web application. You can choose to create hard-copy letters or send your thank-you letters via e-mail.

Analyze your auction data

Bluesky Auction provides you with a comprehensive set of reporting and data analysis tools so that you can learn from your auction data and run smarter auctions in future years. Learn which categories have the highest bid to value ratio. Are there categories of items that don't sell for what they're worth? Are there categories of items that your guests can't seem to get enough of? Bluesky Auction's reporting and analysis toots can help you answer these questions.