Special to the Message
[img_assist|nid=7903|title=Making an impact from Houma|desc=Hank Babin playing music from his iPhone for a very impressed crowd during a recent trip to Haiti.|link=none|align=left|width=640|height=480]HOUMA – In the far-away town of Houma, there is a small Baptist church called Mulberry, which recently hosted one of the most sophisticated online fundraisers eBay Giving Works has seen.
In an effort to help fund their third trip to Haiti to build homes for earthquake victims, Mulberry Church members decided to auction off the donated items that were flooding in from their generous community.
Since there were no resources to host a physical auction event, the group figured it ought to go big and take the auction online to eBay.
The members’ collective eBay experience was quite limited, but they recalled the blue and gold eBay Giving Works ribbons on eBay.com and knew there was a good home for their cause there.
The group’s initial goal was to raise $6,000 from their eBay auction, enough to build one duplex on a 34-acre development in the coastal port town of St. Marc in western Haiti.
Led by church member and deacon Hank Babin, pastor Steve Graves, and secretary Haley Kraemer, the group set up its seller account and set out to emulate ESPN’s successful and well-publicized eBay auction for the cancer foundation established in memory of the late basketball coach Jimmy V.
“We knew we needed to make this auction an event,” said Hank, “to generate interest and fever.”
So with barely any resources, the small group blasted family and friends with e-mails and letters about the auction and organized a regional media blitz, which landed them a donated, digital billboard; a story in the local paper; a spot on the local radio stations a live, local TV appearance; and mentions on regional stations as far away as Baton Rouge.
They had successfully built frenzy around their auction for Haiti.
The next step was to set up the auction on eBay.
Hank set it up so that every item – from least to most valuable – was listed 5 minutes apart on the same day. Items included LSU and Saints football tickets, Taylor Swift concert tickets, vacations, trips, cooking experiences, and more.
This 5-minute-apart arrangement would end all the auction items on the same day, with the small ones selling early on and the larger ones selling off one after the other in the last moments of the auction, garnering higher prices because of the buildup of momentum and excitement around the closing of the auction.
He planned the timing so precisely that the largest item would be open for bidding after people’s kids were in bed and they would have the freedom to focus on buying.
“I still remember when our first item went up,” Hank said. “Steve and I texted 5,000 times, and I was hitting refresh on our eBay page over and over.”
Bidding activity was immediately vibrant and the group met its fundraising goal by the end of the first night of the 10-day auction.
When the auction quickly reached $14,000, doubling Mulberry’s goal, they knew they were on to something huge.
“I had friends in parent-teacher meetings bidding on items from their phones,” Hank recalled. He also said that donors posted their auction items on Facebook, which led to a tangible spike in bidding on eBay.
Ultimately, the church raised $23,000 on eBay and more from its community since then, which brings them to $45,000 raised for their January 2012 trip to help rebuild Haiti.
This amount will allow them to build not only the duplex, but also a school for the children who survived the earthquake, helping turn what was once 34 acres of dirt into a productive community.
Reprinted with permission from www.ebay.com