41 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Should be titled - "An Incomplete Guide", July 2, 2004
By A Customer
This review is from: Fundraising through Silent Auctions: A Complete Guide (Spiral-bound)
If you are buying this book because you are a regular person suddenly involved in putting together an auction - having no previous fundraising experience - I will tell you that I learned a lot more by inviting a local fundraising professional to come chat with our committee for a couple hours than I learned from this book.
It primarily focuses on running the auction tables at the event. It is grossly lacking in advice about how to actually plan the event in the first place. A rather important tidbit. I didn't notice when I bought it online that it was a whopping 50 pages - that would have been a clue. Absolutely not worth the 20 bucks I paid for it.
It touches briefly on committees and volunteers, has a few forms (examples are easy to obtain from the community - no need to buy this book for those), information about running the event itself, and some general hints, but that's about it.
The "complete guide", as he calls it, has no suggestions for how to advertise your event, find attendees/sell tickets, come up with a budget, how to work in other activities at the event (such as a meal), etc. There are no sample invitations, save the date cards, etc. And there is no useful information on procuring items and very limited information on how to track donations in a overly simplistic spreadsheet.
If would suggest that Mr. Dechene keep writing until the book is actually finished.
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