Managing Fundraising Auctions with Tofino : Tag school, everything about school

Testimonial: Roseway Heights School

Posted by Roger Devine Wed, 21 May 2008 04:43:00 GMT

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.

Posted in Testimonials | Tags auction, school, testimonial

Case Study: Ainsworth Foundation Red Ball

Posted by Roger Devine Fri, 09 May 2008 18:07:00 GMT

The annual Red Ball is one of the largest public school fundraisers in Oregon. Through this event, the Ainsworth Foundation helps fund teaching positions and programs like art, library, music, physical education, reading support, and a school counselor both at their school and at other Portland Public Schools, through contributions to the Portland Schools Foundation. In 2008, the Red Ball team used Tofino to manage all elements of their event.

What were you using to manage your auction before Tofino? Why did you switch?

We had been using Auctionpay prior to switching to Tofino. The biggest limitation we were experiencing with Auctionpay was the item entry. The item database must be maintained on one computer at a time, effectively requireing that one individual be responsible for entering, reviewing, and editing all items. Tofino’s web-based design enabled us to have multiple procurement volunteers enter and review items.

Why do you prefer Tofino to other options?

Prior to choosing Tofino we reviewed a number of other online auction solutions, but chose Tofino because of the local support they were able to offer.

How did using Tofino change the way you manage your auction?

Tofino allowed us to distribute the management as previously mentioned. We were not dependant on one individual for the data entry. In addition, the auction chairs were able to easily run reports from their own computers, Windows or Mac. The "database" member of the auction team becomes more of an admisistrator, creating usernames, helping people with the system, and reviewing the data being entered by others.

Any tips or tricks for other customers?

Tofino provides a simple way to produce reports and pull the results into Excel with the click of a button. This is a fantastic feature that will provide your auction team with virtually unlimted analysis and review of the data in Tofino.