Is the Gavel Coming Down on Charity Fund-Raising Auctions?

It had glamour, it had luxury, it had excitement, it had everything. It was a pair of front-row guest tickets to a taping of The Oprah Winfrey Show in Chicago — plus a suite at a top hotel, dinner for two at one of the city’s best restaurants, plus airfare, plus limo.

I was the auctioneer — doing perhaps my 800th such event last month in the gaily decorated East Hall of Washington’s 101-year-old Union Station.

The audience of 350 included a Supreme Court justice, many well-heeled lobbyists, and several founding partners of law and consulting firms. Spouses, business partners, clients, and diplomats were on hand, too — just the kind of crowd that would surely bid to the moon and back.

As I introduced the Oprah package, I expected a stampede.

What I got was nuclear winter.

No bids.

I backpedaled and cajoled. I told the story of how I once unwittingly supplied Oprah with a segment about blind dates — by fixing up two friends who no longer are friends either of me or of each other.

No bids.

I reminded the audience that every dollar we would raise that night would go to a good cause. I observed that this was a great moment for people who might think that $10,000 is too much to spend on a whim but who might think that $2,000 isn’t.

No bids.

Finally, I told the audience that we needed to raise a certain amount on the Oprah item because auction organizers had already spent money to pay for it. If we didn’t make that minimum, I’d have to remove it from the auction.

That did the job — sort of. A board member bid $2,000. A second bid $3,000 — what the item had cost the organizers.

But that’s as far as the bidding went. Three thousand dollars was the final price — $2,000 less than the package’s fair market value and about $7,000 less than auction officials hoped and expected to net from it.

An anomaly? Not according to the fund raisers I’ve surveyed since the evening when the air went out of Ms. Winfrey.

Those fund raisers all say that auctions are losing their effectiveness at a rapid rate. Wall Street turbulence is only partly to blame, they say.

The phenomenon seems to have been mounting for at least the past year, fund raisers say, in part because auctions are no longer novel. Every school seems to do one, every year. Most nonprofit organizations do them. Many churches do them. Even day-care centers do them.

But the vise truly tightened in the first quarter of 2008. Suddenly the weather in auction-land went from cool to downright chilly, several fund raisers say.

One nonprofit children’s group in Philadelphia budgeted a net of $200,000 from its auction, held in January. The final take was $95,000. One entire after-school program will have to be suspended because the money for it isn’t there.

A private school in Washington spent eight months planning its auction, which was held in February. It used a committee of 45 people. It paid $20,000 before the auction started for items such as a round of golf with Tiger Woods and a chance to fly a stunt plane beside a world-famous stunt pilot.

The school recouped the $20,000, on the nose. It made zero profit.

What’s operating here, said one seasoned fund raiser, is exactly what’s operating on Wall Street. Rich people remain very rich, despite the stock market’s rocky first quarter. But they don’t feel rich. So they avoid impulse auction purchases they would have made six months earlier.

There’s also a negative buzz about auctions among some people who encounter a problem at one but have only themselves to blame, the fund raiser said.

A member of a certain social circle spends mega-thousands on a castle in Scotland — and doesn’t read the fine print to see if her preferred date is available. When it isn’t, she blames everyone under the sun except herself. But what the members of her circle hear is that auctions can’t be trusted.

“That’s a hard reputation to overcome,” said the fund raiser.

Auctions can also be a nightmare to organize — and to keep organized.

Well-meaning volunteers will often step up early and offer to obtain items from restaurants, airlines, and hotels. But when they don’t follow through, professional staff members have to jump in and finish the job. If there aren’t enough professional staff members, the circle doesn’t get closed on many potential items, leaving slim pickings on auction night.

That becomes a reason for even more negative buzz, said the fund raiser.

“Whenever I hear that an auction isn’t as good as it used to be, I know what happened,” she said. “Some volunteer didn’t do her job.”

Will auctions die? It’s doubtful. They remain an excellent way to recruit donors and to give board members something practical and important to do. They raise more money in a festive environment than any other method.

And they provide memorable moments.

In 1993, when President Clinton donated a round of golf with himself to a school auction, I was the auctioneer. The bidding climbed beyond $25,000 in less than a minute. A golf date with Bill eventually sold for $56,000. Cost of raising that much money: zero. As long as that kind of figure is available so fast and so easily, charities will not abandon auctions.

As for funny and rare auction stories, they are legion.

At one auction about 10 years ago, I missed a bid because the bidder was lurking in the shadows. The bid I missed was for $15,000 — for a cruise through the Greek Islands for 12. I felt awful, because an auctioneer’s first and only job is to grab whatever dollars are on the table.

Fifteen minutes later, the bidder-I-had-missed approached me and said it had all been his fault. “I was standing in a dark part of the room because I didn’t want my business partner to see me,” he said.

He handed me a check for $15,000. Just a straight-up donation to assuage my hurt feelings and his guilt.

Then there was the woman, obviously tipsy, who bid very high for a New York City theater weekend. A man on the other side of the room kept topping her by a few hundred dollars each time.

As the woman mulled whether to bid some more, I said from the podium, “Ma’am, if that’s your husband next to you, it’s fine with me if you’d like to consult with him.”

Without missing a beat, she replied: “That’s my husband on my right and my lover on my left, and I think I’ll consult with both of them.” I’ve never heard a packed auction hall so silent.

If Wall Street ticks upward, auction profits probably will, too. And yet, some fund raisers worry that auctions have permanently lost their fizz.

“Planned giving will get you more money with a lot more certainty,” said a fund raiser with 20 years of auction experience. “And no one will complain that the entrée was cold and the parking wasn’t free.”

Bob Levey teaches journalism at the University of Memphis. He spent 36 years as a columnist and reporter at The Washington Post. He has also been a senior development executive and a longtime volunteer fund raiser for colleges, arts groups, and health-care institutions.