Testimonial: Roseway Heights School
Posted by Roger Devine
Roseway Heights is a new K-8 school in northeast Portland formed from the former Rose City Park Elementary and Gregory Heights Middle Schools. This year was Roseway Heights’s first auction, though we have had four previous auctions at Rose City Park. We use the proceeds from these auctions to provide funds for staff positions at our schools through the Portland Schools Foundation.
This is the first year we used Tofino. Our first year was manual (yow!) and after that we switched to Auction Pay. We switched from Auction Pay for several reasons, primarily technical:
(1) We had lots of new folks who wanted to help with the auction, and had lost some of our veteran technology people, so we had lost a lot of our institutional familiarity with Auction Pay.
(2) Team members who had seen Tofino felt that its user interface would be simpler to learn & use.
(3) We felt that its web-based architecture would be easier to use during the pre-auction procurement/data entry/catalog generation phase, when many folks are working from their various homes (compared to Auction Pay’s quasi-web-based data entry interface).
(4) We preferred a system that didn’t require Windows, both for philosophical reasons and practical (we had almost no Windows machines readily available to us for use on site during the auction).
(5) The prospect of saving money, especially in credit card processing fees, was certainly attractive as well.
(6) We like the story of Tofino: a local business run by fellow parent/auction volunteers!
Now, if Tofino was simply an easier to use Auction Pay that saves me money and doesn’t make me use Windows, I’d be pretty happy. But it gave us several other advantages as well. We were able to promote our auction catalog on line in the days leading up to the auction and that really helped generate interest. (In the future we’d like to take advantage of online auctions as well.) Tofino also has a much more flexible approach to the relationship between items, lots, and tables, and that spared us a lot of the tedious software manipulation that we were used to with AuctionPay. On the flip side, now that we’ve learned the software better, I think we’ll be able to approach it next year and use it more effectively, rather than always trying to map concepts to the way Auction Pay does things.
I’d also like to praise the user interface for the night of the auction - that whole part of the software is a real pleasure to use. And the folks in the company are a pleasure to work with and very
responsive!
Ted Slupesky was Technology Chair for the 2008 Roseway Heights auction.
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