Make sure bidders SEE the merchandise at your benefit auction

Think of the tables at your silent auction as prime retail locations when you are planning the set up for your benefit auction. You need those tables to be the equivalent of the sales floor at Neiman Marcus. You want donated items to call out to guests and inspire the thoughts of the wonderful times they will have with that hotel stay, gift basket, bicycle or whatever the procurement committee has secured.

Your auction committee should borrow a strategy from the retail industry: Put merchandise up in front of people. In other words, go vertical!

Vertical displays can be created in several ways. Whether you choose heavy paper with photo frame legs or poster board and easels,the key is to get item descriptions off the horizontal plane. When items are horizontal, guests will bump and crowd, while others just pass right by.

Vertical displays are preferred because multiple people can view the description simultaneously. Granted, this isn’t the clearance sale at Barney’s so usually no one is going to elbow a guest … but when an item is laying flat, one person must move on before someone else can move in to read it. Horizontally presented items force guests to hover over the item and only one person can comfortably admire the item at a time. But when presented vertically, your guests can stand comfortably and feast their eyes on all the tempting items your team has secured. Increase the visibility, and mount your item descriptions vertically.

Oh, and vertical displays can go BIG! Most horizontal displays are on an 8 ½ x 11 sheet of paper … but vertically you might opt for something larger, like legal-size paper (see photo) or posterboard. Oversized is much easier to achieve when you lift the display up on its edge.

Another perk is that vertical displays just make for a more attractive sales floor. Visually, vertical displays gives the silent auction some punch, which is the same reason department stores display jewelry at eye level and stack fragrance boxes up in a pyramid on circular tables.

Photo caption: A vertical display of a trip.

Visit Sherry’s Red Apple Auctions blog for advice and photos on charity auctions.

This article has been published with permission from Red Apple Auctions LLC.

Feature image courtesy of