The print auction has now been and gone. I am very relieved it's over because it was very frustrating at times because it felt like all of us in the second year were doing everything for the auction without the help of the third years. I knew the auction would happen and it would all come together but it could have been better.
The day of the auction:
We didn't have too much to do we just needed to package up the last of the prints, hand out some more posters and leaflets and write up a little bit of information about our prints so that the auctioneer, who was a student from our year could say a few facts about what our prints were about.
I took on the job of going round with 200 posters and putting them anywhere where I thought they would be seen. I went back round the college and put some posters and leaflets around. I then went into town and asked around town if I could put posters around.
Once I had got rid of most of the leaflets I then didn't have anything else to do until the set up of the auction came.
When time came round to help set up the auction we spoke through everyone's job roles and we found out that one person who was supposed to help with the prints wasn't there so I offered to help with the prints as my other job was to help show people into the auction and there was plenty of people doing that job so I felt I would be more helpful helping with the prints. This was now my job so I took it upon myself to lay all the prints out in order ready for the auction. We all soon realised that there was too many prints to fit out on display so we left all the artists work on the table and put the students work in order in the office.
When everyone started to arrive we were all just milling around making sure we were all ready for the auction to start. The mayor and lady mayor attended and she looked through catalogue. She liked my prints and wanted to speak to me so I spoke to the Lady Mayor about my work. I was very organised and made sure everything was in order because I didn't want everything to be unorganised, I wanted everything to be plane sailing so I decided to stay with the prints at all times and make sure that everyone who was taking the prints to the front had the right one at all times. I think this worked very successfully. There was one print that we didn't have so we had to quickly skip it forward as we couldn't advertise it but apart from that it all went really well.
Our discussion reflecting the auction:
Since the Print Auction we have sat down in two small groups and discussed what we thought went well at the auction and what didn't go as well.
Positives:
We raised a good amount of money
We had a bar
We sold the majority of the prints we had on sale
Jamie did a good job at the auctioneer
The table layout worked well
Student work sold well
The small postcard prints sold well and were a good touch
Everyone enjoyed the snacks
Negatives:
Needed to start the bidding earlier
Make proper signage for catering and postcards
Do more fundraising beforehand
More people (promote earlier)
Find an auctioneer earlier
Get someone who can use a card machine (a payment messed up)
Better communication between organisers
Smaller prints sold better which meant they would work better
Write information on back of postcard prints so people know more about the prints
More appropriate music
Later time
Simplify it - we felt we made it a lot more complicated than we needed it be
We then thought of a couple of fundraising ideas that we could do to raise a bit of money before the print auction next year:
Postcard fundraiser
Christmas Card sale
Overall, I did think the auction went well but I think it would have been better if we had some more people come as I think sometimes they weren't aware of the photographers and how much the prints normally sell for so it would have been nice for some more people with more photographic knowledge.
コメント