The Business of Making a Difference

Justin James | Comedy Auctioneer | September 2026

The Business of Making a Difference

Every member of our team holds the National Auction Association’s Benefit Auction Specialist designation. In practical terms, that means we’ve all completed a three-day, 24-hour professional training program focused on benefit auctioneering.

The training is valuable. However, a three-day course cannot replace decades of working live events, week in and week out.

I’ve spent more than 30 years in entertainment and live events. Across our team, we’ve seen a thousand variations on the same themes: what works, what doesn’t, what looks good on paper and falls apart in the room, and the small decisions that can have surprisingly large consequences once the doors open.

That experience is what shapes the questions we ask, the problems we spot, and the recommendations we make.

Why People Call

Organizations come to us for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes they’re ready to move from volunteers or part-time help to professionals who do this for a living. Sometimes the auctioneer, emcee, entertainer, or event professional they’ve relied on for years has retired, moved on, or simply isn’t available for this year’s event.

And sometimes they’re calling because last year didn’t go particularly well.

Every week, we hear many of the same stories:

Our auctioneer couldn’t control the room.
The auctioneer moved too fast and people couldn’t follow the bidding.
The auctioneer was painfully slow and we lost the room.
Our auctioneer said something from the stage that offended people.
The auctioneer didn’t understand our organization or our mission.
Our live auction packages didn’t perform anywhere near where we expected.
Our paddle raise fell flat.
We raised money, but we know we left money in the room.
People started leaving as soon as the fundraising began.
Our guests thought they were coming to a party, not a fundraiser.
People were surprised when we started asking them for money.
Everybody was drunk by the time we started fundraising.
There was a party going on in the back of the room while we were trying to raise money.
The bar was competing with the fundraising.
The speeches went on forever.
Dinner ran long and threw the entire program behind.
By the time we got to the fundraising, we’d already lost the room.
Attendance went up, but fundraising didn’t.
We’ve been doing essentially the same event for years, and it’s become stagnant.
Our volunteers weren’t trained.
Nobody knew who was supposed to be doing what.
AV wasn’t ready when we needed it.
Our auction software failed us. Again.
Registration was a disaster.
Checkout became a huge bottleneck.

The Biggest Mistake Fundraising Events Make

One of the biggest mistakes I see organizations make is hiring a benefit auctioneer based primarily on their ability to conduct a live auction.

They’ve got a great chant. They’re entertaining. Maybe they’ve got the cowboy hat. They can move through six or eight auction packages and keep the bidding going.

Those things matter.

They’re also only a fraction of the job.

Think about the math. At a typical fundraising event with 300 or 400 guests and six to eight live auction packages, only a handful of people can ultimately win those items. Even when you include everyone who bids and doesn’t win, the overwhelming majority of the room still has to be engaged in some other way.

Your real fundraising opportunity is the rest of the room.

That’s where benefit auctioneering becomes very different from traditional bid calling.

A benefit auctioneer isn’t simply there to sell eight things to eight winning bidders. The job is to connect hundreds of people to the mission, manage the room, create participation, conduct the games and revenue enhancers, lead the paddle raise, make the hard ask, and give people at different levels a reason and an opportunity to participate.

The live auction matters. However, if that’s the only thing your auctioneer knows how to do well, you’ve hired someone for the smallest part of the opportunity.

Not a 15-Minute Engagement

Another mistake I see is thinking of your auctioneering team as the people who show up for fifteen or twenty minutes, call a few bids, run a paddle raise, and disappear.

That is not how a professional benefit auctioneering team works.

If your staff is arriving two hours early to prepare the room, your auctioneering team should be arriving with them. They are there to walk the space, meet the people they will be working with, coordinate with AV, review the run of show, check the auction materials, prepare volunteers, understand the flow of the room, and make sure everyone knows what is supposed to happen before the doors open.

Then they stay with you through the event.

Because the fundraising portion of the evening is not an isolated fifteen-minute performance. It is the point where much of the work leading up to the event finally has to convert.

You may have spent months securing sponsors, selling tables, building auction packages, producing videos, recruiting volunteers, and getting donors into the room. Event night is where all of that preparation comes together and where your organization has to make the ask.

That is a significant responsibility to hand someone.

A quality benefit auctioneer doesn’t begin learning your event when they step onto the stage. Long before event night, they should understand your organization, your audience, your fundraising goals, your live auction, your paddle raise, your program, and the people responsible for making it all work.

For many events, that means ten to twenty hours of preparation and coordination before the auctioneer ever takes the microphone.

> You are not hiring someone for fifteen minutes. You are hiring someone to understand your event well enough to make those fifteen minutes count.

The Fastest Way to Lose the Room

When organizations ask me how to raise more money at their event, the answer is rarely one thing.

Once I understand how the event has been operating, there are usually dozens of opportunities: clearer messaging, better pacing, stronger mission focus, paddles people can actually read from the stage, better lighting, cleaner transitions, and fewer distractions competing with the ask.

And then there is alcohol.

A lot of organizations still believe they need to loosen people up before asking them to give. I have a real problem with that idea. If someone has to be intoxicated before they will support your mission, you have a much bigger problem than fundraising technique.

The goal is not to get people drunk. The goal is to get them connected.

Once an audience moves from engaged to inebriated, attention drops fast. If dinner runs long, speeches drag, the bar stays open, and the fundraising comes late in the evening, your auctioneer can walk onto the stage facing three different events at once: one at the bar, one at the sponsor tables, and one in front of the stage.

At that point, nobody is really fundraising. The auctioneer is just trying to regain control of the room.

I tell clients this all the time: your auctioneer should not have to walk onstage, strap in, and ride a bull for eight seconds just to survive the fundraising portion of the night.

A successful event does not need a drunk audience.

It needs an audience that understands why they are there.

Fun Can Be a Revenue Strategy

Gamification is a term that gets used a lot, but many fundraising events still underuse it.

Done well, games can become some of the most profitable and memorable moments of the night, even when the mission itself is serious.

That can be something as simple as a Dessert Dash or Golden Ticket, or something more interactive like Last Paddle Standing. Depending on the room and the format, these moments can add meaningful revenue to the event while doing something equally important:

They make the night more fun.

Your guests may care deeply about the mission, but they are still giving up an evening to be there. They want to connect, participate, laugh, compete, and enjoy themselves while supporting the organization.

When the event gives them those opportunities, participation usually becomes easier.

And in the right room, the financial upside can be significant. A well-designed game can generate thousands of dollars, sometimes tens of thousands, while creating the kind of moment guests remember long after the event is over.

Fun is not the opposite of serious fundraising. Done correctly, it can be one of the tools that makes serious fundraising work better.

If We Can’t See the Paddle, We Can’t Take the Bid

Sight lines matter.

That sounds obvious, but it is one of the most common technical problems we encounter in fundraising rooms. Your auctioneer and spotters have to be able to see your donors, and your donors have to be able to see what is happening on stage.

Three things routinely get in the way: the room itself, the centerpieces, and the paddles.

Walk onto the stage of a large ballroom and look left and right. Are speaker stacks blocking entire sections of tables? Are large floral arrangements covering half the people seated behind them? Can you actually see the bidder numbers from sixty or eighty feet away?

That last one causes more trouble than it should.

A beautiful paddle is useless if somebody wrote the bidder number on it with a two-dollar permanent marker and nobody onstage can read it. Your auctioneer should not need binoculars to figure out whether they are looking at paddle 138 or 188.

These sound like small details until a bid gets missed.

Fundraising is happening in real time. Your team needs clean sight lines across the room and bidder numbers that can be identified quickly and accurately. If we’re asking people to raise their paddles, the first requirement should be making sure we can actually see them.

If They Can’t Hear You, They’ll Talk to Each Other

Audio is one of the most important parts of a live fundraising event. It is also one of the most underestimated.

We routinely see organizations look at the cost of professional AV and decide to rely instead on the hotel’s built-in ceiling speakers or basic house PA. Those systems may be perfectly adequate for announcements or a corporate meeting.

A live fundraising event is something entirely different.

You’ve got several hundred people in a ballroom. They’re eating, drinking, talking, moving around, and sitting at very different distances from the stage. Your auctioneer, emcee, mission speakers, videos, music, and fundraising moments all depend on one system tying the room together.

If someone sitting in the back of the ballroom cannot understand the person onstage as clearly as someone sitting near the front, you’ve already created a problem.

Because people don’t sit quietly trying to decipher bad audio for very long.

They start another conversation.

And once tables begin having their own conversations, your stage is competing for attention instead of controlling it. During the fundraising portion of the evening, that lost attention can become lost participation.

A professional PA system and capable AV support are not production luxuries. They are part of the infrastructure that allows the rest of your program to work.

The Paddle Raise Is Not an Afterthought

One of the most underused fundraising opportunities at many events is the paddle raise.

A strong paddle raise should not be dropped randomly into the program or treated as something the auctioneer will simply “handle” when the time comes. It works best when it is deliberately positioned after a meaningful mission moment, when the room understands the need and is emotionally ready to respond.

That is the hard ask.

And when it is structured correctly, it can completely change the financial arc of the night.

We have seen organizations produce dramatically different results simply because they stopped hoping people would donate and actually gave the room a clear, organized opportunity to do it.

A well-built paddle raise creates multiple entry points for participation, gives donors a reason to raise their paddle, and allows the auctioneer to build momentum through the room instead of making one vague appeal and moving on.

For many organizations, this can be the largest fundraising moment of the entire evening.

Treating it casually can mean leaving tens of thousands of dollars on the table. In larger rooms, potentially far more.

If your mission matters enough to bring everyone into the room, it matters enough to ask them directly to support it.

> Your mission depends on a quality ask.

The Emcee Is the Connective Tissue

A strong event does not simply move from one agenda item to the next. It has to feel connected.

That is the emcee’s job.

The emcee keeps control of the room and keeps the night moving. They handle voice-of-God announcements, move guests from one space to another, open the program, recognize sponsors, introduce speakers, bridge transitions, reset attention after breaks, and create the handoffs that make separate pieces feel like one event.

Then they work alongside the auctioneer to set up the live auction and paddle raise, protect the fundraising moments, and help bring the night to a clean close.

That makes the emcee one of the few people who touches nearly every part of the program.

And this is where many organizations make a costly mistake: they hand the job to a volunteer.

The problem is not that the volunteer cares less. Usually, they care more.

The problem is that very few people stand in front of a live audience week after week with a script in their hand and responsibility for keeping an entire room engaged.

That is a very specific skill.

Even people who are comfortable speaking for a living often work in controlled environments. A television presenter may deliver polished material every day, but a studio is not a ballroom. A live audience talks back. They get distracted. They arrive late. They laugh in the wrong place. They miss cues. Dinner runs long. A video fails. A sponsor is skipped. A speaker takes twice as much time as expected.

A professional emcee has to absorb all of that without letting the room feel the disruption.

Some events are well served by one professional handling both the emcee and auctioneer roles. Others are stronger when those responsibilities are split between two people. Either approach can work.

What does not work well is treating the emcee role as an afterthought.

Caring about the mission is not enough. Being comfortable with a microphone is not enough. And handing someone a script the night before and expecting them to turn it into a polished live program is not preparation.

A good emcee needs time to understand the organization, the speakers, the sponsor obligations, the fundraising, and the purpose of every transition in the program.

A good emcee does not simply read the run of show. They make the run of show work in a live room.

The Run of Show Is the Operating System

The run of show is the document that makes everything else work.

It tells people where they need to be, when they need to be there, what happens next, who owns each transition, and how the program moves from one piece to another. In many events, it also becomes the backbone for the scripting used throughout the night.

That makes it one of the most important documents you will create.

And yet, charitable events often leave it until the last minute.

Then the scrambling begins.

The program changes. Speakers change. Videos move. Dinner timing shifts. Sponsor recognition gets added. Fundraising gets pushed. Scripts get rewritten. And now the document that was supposed to create order is being corrected again and again, sometimes right up until the doors open.

That is the opposite of what a run of show is supposed to do.

A strong run of show should give everyone a shared understanding of how the night works before the night begins.

Then comes scripting.

One of the biggest failure points we see is an executive director, founder, board chair, or key speaker who refuses to work from a script.

No one is asking them to become a robot.

The point of scripting is alignment.

If nobody else knows what that person is planning to say, then the emcee cannot properly set them up, the next speaker cannot build from them, the fundraising message cannot reinforce them, and the rest of the program cannot be written around them.

A rogue element on stage can derail everything around it.

They may repeat information that was already covered. They may run long. They may step on the fundraising message. They may introduce ideas nobody else is prepared to support. Or they may unintentionally take the audience in a completely different emotional direction minutes before the ask.

The solution is simple: script early.

Give speakers a starting point, an ending point, the key ideas they need to land, and the time they have to do it. If they hate the draft, let them edit it. Let them challenge it. Let them tear it apart.

Just do that weeks before the event, not the night before.

Then rehearse.

Rehearsal is where timing problems, awkward transitions, missing information, and conflicting messages are supposed to surface. Finding those problems in a conference room is considerably cheaper than discovering them from the stage.

A strong run of show creates the plan. Good scripting creates alignment. Rehearsal makes sure the plan survives contact with the room.

Friction Costs Money

One of the easiest ways to improve a fundraising event is to use software that actually makes the event easier to attend.

A good event platform should help manage ticketing, registration, payments, silent auction bidding, live auction information, bidder numbers, checkout, and the other moving parts that surround the night.

The important part is not the software itself.

It is removing friction.

If someone wants to attend your event, buying a ticket should be simple. They should be able to find the event, purchase their tickets, enter their information, run a credit card, and move on with their day without fighting through an outdated form, waiting for an invoice, or wondering whether the transaction actually went through.

The same thing applies when they arrive.

Registration should move. Guests should be able to check in, receive what they need, get their bidder number, and enter the event without spending twenty minutes standing in a line while volunteers search spreadsheets or troubleshoot payments.

Yes, quality event software costs money. So do processing fees.

However, the real comparison is not software cost versus no software cost. It is software cost versus lost ticket sales, abandoned registrations, longer lines, confused guests, missed bids, difficult checkout, staff time, and an organization still trying to reconcile everything the following morning.

For some organizations, those differences can be measured in tens of thousands of dollars.

The less work you make your donors do to participate, the easier it is for them to say yes.

Take the Silent Auction Off Paper

Once you have the right software in place, one of the simplest operational improvements is moving your silent auction away from paper bid sheets.

The old model creates work everywhere. Staff and volunteers have to monitor sheets, close bidding manually, determine winners, enter results, reconcile bidder numbers, prepare checkout, and then somehow collect payment from everyone before they leave.

A modern silent auction can do most of that work for you.

At minimum, we like to see guests able to register and begin participating before event night, often a week or more in advance. That gives people time to browse the auction, place bids, receive notifications when they are outbid, and come into the event already engaged.

When it is time to close the auction, you are no longer scrambling around the room collecting bid sheets. You close bidding in the platform and winners are determined automatically. Depending on the system and how you have configured it, winning purchases can be settled directly against the payment information already on file.

That can eliminate hours of manual work before, during, and after the event.

More importantly, your team can spend event night taking care of guests instead of trying to become an accounting department in the middle of a ballroom.

The Scale Changes. The Fundamentals Don’t.

Whether your fundraising goal is $25,000 or $2 million, the basic principles of a successful event are remarkably similar.

You need a room people want to be in. You need good food, good energy, and a program that keeps people engaged. You need guests to understand your mission, why the work matters, and why their support matters tonight.

And when the program moves to the stage, you need professionals managing the moments that matter most.

Your emcee and auctioneer carry an enormous amount of responsibility. Speakers matter. Videos matter. Sponsors matter. Entertainment matters. Every piece can improve the night.

However, strip a fundraising program down to its essentials and you can see how important those two roles really are.

Give a strong emcee a well-built program, a quality impact video, and an experienced auctioneer. Add some trained volunteer spotters and recorders. That team can welcome the room, recognize sponsors and donors, establish the mission, move into the impact story, conduct the paddle raise, run fundraising games, sell the live auction, and bring the program to a close.

That does not mean the rest of the event is unnecessary.

It means those stage roles are foundational.

The difference between simply making an event work and creating an exceptional fundraising night is what happens when all of the pieces begin working together: a disciplined run of show, concise scripting, the right impact story, prepared speakers, a professional emcee, trained volunteers, quality production, and an auctioneering team focused on the mission rather than simply calling bids.

That is when results can change dramatically.

A $50,000 event can become a $100,000 event. A $100,000 event can become a $250,000 event. And in the right room, with the right audience and the right structure, the ceiling can move far beyond what the organization originally thought was possible.

That is why a professional benefit auctioneering team should be asking questions long before anyone raises a paddle.

What happened last year? What did you raise? Where did the program struggle? What does the run of show look like? Who is scripting the speakers? How long is the impact video? Where does the paddle raise sit in the program? When does the bar close? How are volunteers being trained? Can the auctioneer actually see the bidder numbers? Does your messaging before the event prepare people to give when they arrive?

Those questions are not busywork.

They are how experienced event professionals look for opportunities.

The job is not simply to show up and conduct an auction. The job is to understand your event well enough to help make every fundraising opportunity count.

Why I Do This

People ask me all the time why I do what I do.

The answer is pretty simple.

I love entertaining people, and I love making a difference in the lives of others. If I can do both at the same time, I’m exactly where I want to be.

A lot of what we work through before an event can look like minutiae: paddle numbers, lighting, timing, scripts, volunteer positions, software, transitions, bar service, sight lines. Small things.

Until they go wrong.

Then those small things become very large problems in the middle of a live event. I would much rather find them weeks beforehand, roll up our sleeves, and solve them before anyone ever walks through the doors.

Because when the preparation is right, the fun part gets really fun.

Walking onto the stage at a well-run event is a thrill. Connecting with an audience, building energy in the room, making the hard ask, and watching paddle after paddle go into the air is something I never get tired of seeing.

Those paddles represent something much bigger than an auction total. They represent people deciding, together, that the work your organization is doing matters.

And yes, it is a lot of fun.

But before we get to the fun, we have to do the work.

So tell us what your organization is dealing with. What happened last year? What is frustrating you? Where are you leaving opportunity on the table? What would you like to change this year?

Then we start asking questions.

What can we improve? What needs to change? What should we leave alone? And how do we create a stronger connection between your donors, your event, and the mission you brought everyone together to support?

We do this every day.

And often, the answer to changing the arc of your night starts long before anyone steps onto the stage.

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