HAAS of KC 2012 Spring Auction

[slimbolen99]

[slimbolen99]

Just two weeks away. Hope to see some of you guys there.

[dennysfishroom]

I've been trying to think about how we can generate the level of interest in our auction that HAAS is generating for theirs. it really sounds like there are going to be a lot of interesting things in their auction next Saturday. we need to start thinking about how to get interesting things in our auction. The volume of responses on the HAAS site concerning the auction has been impressive. Denny

[etheonut]

They are drawing from a larger club and a larger community. It is more attractive to sellers and to buyers.
Sellers are more likely to have their items bid on. Buyers are more like to find a wide variety of items to look at.

Rather than ask the question, "How can we be like them?" maybe instead ask the question, "How can we use the resources we have to put on a unique, attractiv auction?"
NWAAS is always going to have a smaller, more personal auction, at least for the near future.

Personally for me, I will make the trip to KC to sell fish. The fish that I keep and am willing to sell just don't do well in a small auction in a community without a well developed aquarium interest. That was clear in the last auction when I had breeder pairs sell for under $5.

Maybe you all should concentrate on having great prices on bread and butter type fish with a smattering of interesting/unique fish. Get the buyers in the doors and the sellers will follow with their fish.

Kevin

[Jackielee]

The auction whether here or there has to draw enough people that members are not just trading fish, you can do that at a meeting. I think auctions are best when more people from the community come than from the club. The forums help draw in some people and part of the draw is just being known to the fish keeping community. That is probably a thing that takes time and perseverance. You guys have a great club there and I always enjoy my trips down to attend your functions. Bigger is not always better.

[slimbolen99]

Do you guys send mailings out for your auctions? I know you do a great job at advertising online, but wasn't sure if you had a mailing list. Mikey does ours, and seems like we get a pretty good turn out from the folks that may not be online at all or enough to see our promotions. We capture mailing addresses from everyone who has ever been to one of our auctions, meetings, and sometimes even the website. To date, we send approx 700 or so post cards.

[fishbit]

Mailings are a good idea,but I got my HAAS Auction Postcard the day of the auction!If we do mailings we might want to do it a little earlier than they do.

[mewickham]

We've sent e-mail reminders for auctions, but never sent actual postcards or flyers.

By the way, if you're not doing it already, you might want to have your postal mailing list processed by one of those services that cleans it up by running through the National Change of Address service or whatever. Something like 20% of people move each year, so a lot of money can be wasted sending to addresses where the aquarist long ago moved away. When I did direct mail as a retailer, we were amazed at how many addresses had to be changed or deleted each year. The NCOA will update the person's address so that the mail still reaches them, but, if I recall correctly, it only tracks the data for a year or so. So really old lists may end up with more deletions than address changes.

We did a mass postal mailing to request donations from vendors for our first auction a couple of years ago. I think we got back something like half of them as undeliverable. It was a lot of wasted money at a time when we still had no auction under our belt to put money in the treasury. I believe we got the address list from HAAS.