How to Enter Donations

Other Item related topics:

• Items missing from Catalog
• How to enter Images on items
• Featured Item on Home Page

See this Quick Guide created by a user of TogetherAuction:
Entering and Editing Items in the Online Catalog

Entering Donations:

Also, note that both Est Value and Min bid are required, so I typically take the value shown and put in about half for the opening bid. We found leaving it blank made for some 1$ sales with the potential to dissapoint donors. The system won't enforce it, so you can always 'discount' it on the spot at your discretion, but we found it helpful. Means you have to be in the business of making up values for things without much to go on.

The +1 ok checkbox means the donor could 'pull up an extra chair' if necessary to accomodate a couple that would otherwise be excluded. This is for when the last winning bid would like 2 seats when only one remains - if it's checked we give it to them, otherwise we move up the list looking for a single, failing that a seat goes empty. It's the result of lessons learned that it's real hard to locate a donor at the last second during the live or silent auction to ask them if they can take one more - better to ask up front.

Images can go a long way towards bringing attention to an item in the online catalog. You can upload an image from your computer and the system will automatically scale it to a web-appropriate file size. If you are using software that can export files 'for emailing' (versus for printing at full size) they will upload faster, but if you don't know anything about that don't worry - it's all automatic.

New for 2018: There's now a Rotate button under the picture. Instead of saving, rotating, and re-uploading, you can just click the Rotate button to rotate and save in one click. Repeat as needed.

The specific lot checkbox is for 'substantially similar' things - knitted scarves in different colors, for example. Think of it as doing xerox copies of the bid sheet and writing A, B, C...etc for as many qty as there are. There's extra logic to remember who gets which one, plus each sheet says Qty=1 so you don't accidentally oversell them. You may not need it, but it's quite handy when you do; it keeps you from making multiple copies of items (and bloating out the catalog). Also works well for things like massages (a=polarity balance, b=deep tissue...etc). where you can use one description for several similar things with same price/date. (Like anything else, each seat/qty/color can sell for a different price, but they are the same item so they can only be listed in the catalog at one price)

if you just want to know how to put link to a web site in your item, you can just put the link in the description - the (optional) image URL is only used to put a picture next to the item in the catalog. So for example,

<a href="http://www.chicagobears.com">Da Bears</a>

would make a blue "Da Bears" link in your description. (You can't put such embellishments in the item's title)

Each bid sheet will say either: "Winner Collects Item Tonight!" or "Not a take-home item" to assist with item distributions from the silent auction. (Thanks to Dee from Boulder Valley UU Fellowship for this idea).
This is controlled by a new checkbox on the item entry screen between the title and description:

Tangible _ Does winner collect item? (No for dinners, services, events, ...etc.)

The category setup page also has a related new checkbox:

Most items are physical items (picked-up immediately) _ Checked for things, Unchecked for events

This controls the default tangible setting as an item's category is chosen. For example, Art and China/Glassware are usually tangible items, so they start with tangible checked, but Dinner of course isn't, so those will be unchecked. Food is sometimes picked up and sometimes arranged to be made later, so it starts off unchecked but can be checked as needed for each item.

Can we customize the interface for the donation form itself?

I don't have it setup to do that (except of course the categories are dynamic). The best solution I've seen is to hide the donate button on the main page and replace them with a link to a form on your own website (which you can enter into the system from yourself). If you have any other ideas about how that might work, I'm open to the idea of doing that. It would be a matter of deciding whether the level of effort matches the benefit. It would be easier to make things configurable 'once' (similar to the [[phone mask|Member+Phone+Number+format] - you'd have to ask me to change it, but I can do that and then re-build your system and it would take effect then). So for example we could come up with a series of customizable input item labels for each element, but leave the general layout fixed. It's significantly more complex to re-arrange the item entry form's structure (to allow for moving fields around and such).