Small Donors, Big Impact: Making Fundraising Events Worth the Effort

Fundraising events often get a bad rap in higher education. Too much work, too little return, and a whole lot of stress. But what if events could actually work as a meaningful part of your fundraising strategy? In this episode of Higher Ed Conversations, GradComm CEO Cheryl Broom sits down with Roger Devine, founder of SchoolAuction.net, to unpack how experience-driven fundraising events can generate real results for colleges and universities, but without ice sculptures, endless lines, or burned-out staff. Devine shares his journey from publishing and tech to launching a fundraising platform born out of PTA frustration, and explains why so many institutions make events more complicated than they need to be. Together, Cheryl and Roger explore how putting the guest experience at the center of event design can improve donor satisfaction, boost participation, and increase long-term giving.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why fundraising events don’t have to just break even, and how to make them a meaningful revenue stream.
• How focusing on the guest experience directly impacts donor satisfaction and future giving.
• The role small and mid-level donors play in building long-term fundraising success.
• How to start with a simple event and scale strategically over time.
• The pros, cons, and hidden costs of common fundraising software pricing models.

Connect with Roger at roger@schoolauction.net.

Thanks for listening!

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Cheryl Broom: Well, Roger, thank you so much for joining me today. It's great having you on the podcast. 

[00:00:05] Roger Devine: I appreciate it, Cheryl. Good. Great to be here.

[00:00:07] Cheryl Broom: I wanted to start off by having you tell me a little bit about your background in publishing and what led you to launch schoolauction.net. 

[00:00:17] Roger Devine: Yeah, as you can kind of see in the background, books are important to me and I, uh, started my career out really early on in book publishing. But. That led me through various things to technology, to publishing online, et cetera. And that leads to the whole big world of internet-based businesses, which is something I then chose to work in for about 20 years.

[00:00:43] Roger Devine: And, when we moved from New York City to Portland, Oregon, which is where we live right now. Lovely place. I was working in tech, working for various tech companies and got laid off and you know, as one does when one gets laid off, you print up business cards. You call yourself a consultant and you throw them around everywhere.

[00:01:03] Roger Devine: And you hope somebody pays attention. And I did manage to get the attention of some other guys here in town, who were also, who were also parents of young children who were also very involved in their education. I was PTA president at the time and we were looking around to do a fundraiser for my PTA.

[00:01:27] Roger Devine: I got connected with these other guys who had built something for their school, which is in the same neighborhood, and we decided to commercialize the product. Decided to take it out there 'cause it looked better than anything else we'd seen out there. So we started that and here we are 20 plus years later.

[00:01:46] Cheryl Broom: I love stories that start with recognizing that there's a need out there. Even if that need is really niched, you are like, oh, I can solve a problem. And I know that when you joined the PTA, you saw, you saw a problem. 

[00:02:01] Roger Devine: Oh yeah, no, I definitely saw a problem, which was that we were conducting our annual fundraising event. We held an a ga, a little gala with a silent auction and a live auction and things like that. This is an elementary school, PTA, and that worked out really well. But we, everybody up until that point had been doing everything manually.

[00:02:19] Roger Devine: I'd been doing it with spiral notebooks and knuckle busters to process credit cards. And it's like you, you know, you know folks, we're living in a time where things can get easier and so we, you know, I started looking around 'cause I was a softer guy and I was a tech guy. It's like, I know what software can do.

[00:02:40] Roger Devine: There's gotta be some software out there for this. And it turns out there was. It wasn't really appropriate for schools. It was generally more appropriate for really high-end nonprofits, you know, for the kinds of galas that you see on TV shows, right? So we decided to bring out a product that would make running a gala cost effective, make it easy enough to do with kind of skeleton crew that A PTA is gonna be able to cobble together a skeleton crew of volunteers, by the way.

[00:03:14] Roger Devine: Are gonna, you know, go somewhere else the next year. You can't count on them to be repeat users. So all this time you spend training them, you know, is really only useful for one year. And, we set up a, you know, we set up our company around these, this set up particular needs 

[00:03:31] Cheryl Broom: Right. 

[00:03:32] Roger Devine: to meet them.

[00:03:33] Cheryl Broom: So tell, tell us a little bit about what your company does and, and the support that you give to schools. 

[00:03:41] Roger Devine: Sure. So when it comes to fundraising events like this, it's usually, I think, useful to start out by thinking about the guest experience and what kind of thing you wanna put out there. Generally. For most of my customers, most of my school customers, at a fundraising event, there will be somewhere between two and six different mechanisms that the charity is going to use to solicit donations from people in the room to suck money out of the fat wallets.

[00:04:13] Roger Devine: There's a variety of tools. You can use this. You can use auctions both live and silent. Maybe raffles, maybe some. Maybe you sell merch. Maybe you simply take donations. But if you're thinking about this, this is a guest coming into a room. You need to move. You need the guest to be able to move through the entire experience while they are feeling good and generous.

[00:04:35] Roger Devine: We wanna avoid any moment during us this magical evening where the guest starts to feel annoyed. Why would a guest feel annoyed? You know, they would feel annoyed 'cause you're making 'em stand in line for a long time. They would, they would feel annoyed because they're just trying to pay you after the event and just get home and you're making them go through a whole process to do that, you know?

[00:04:58] Roger Devine: And so I like to think of a fundraising event as a department store that's only open for six hours a year. And if you think about what do you need at a department store to conduct business during the course of a day, you need inventory management, you need sales management, you need payment processing, you need merchandising, all of this stuff, you know you need in order to conduct the event at somewhat of a professional level.

[00:05:28] Roger Devine: And can you hack all of that with manual work You can. But it's gonna take you three to four times the number of volunteers. Then it would take you if you just had some efficient software in place 

[00:05:39] Cheryl Broom: Yeah, 

[00:05:39] Roger Devine: lot of that for you.

[00:05:40] Cheryl Broom: and I love that you.

[00:05:41] Cheryl Broom: are coming at this from the perspective of the person attending the event. Because I've been at fundraising events where it's time to check out and I'm tired and I wanna go home. I might have eaten too much food. I'm like, oh God, now I gotta do all this. 

[00:05:58] Roger Devine: You might be, they might have had dancing. You might be a little sweaty, you know, you be a little drunk. You know, these things happen Yeah, and the guest Yeah, and the most critical thing for an organization that's gonna run a fundraising event is that it, it's critical to understand that what you do this year or this year's fundraising event is the basis for next year It is setting the basis for how your guests can expect to be treated next year, so that when you go to start selling tickets next year to that event, you know people will receive the invitation. Gratefully, if you had, if they had a good time, if they had a bad time, they might not buy tickets, and then you might not have a successful fundraiser.

[00:06:44] Cheryl Broom: Yeah. A lot of our listeners on this podcast are higher ed marketers And advancement and, and just hearing you talk about. The experience of someone at the fundraiser and developing technology to help that experience better reminds me so much of just like everyday problems in higher education, where it's like, why do we make things harder than they have to be?

[00:07:07] Cheryl Broom: Like, you want somebody to come back. You want them to donate, you want them to have a good experience. Let's focus on improving their experience.

[00:07:16] Roger Devine: And I think where current development directors are really, really, really strong. You know, exceptionally strong, this is what they do and they do it well, is with that kind of cultivation on a one-to-one basis with donors. You know, identify your most important supporters of a given school or a given program or whatever, and focus efforts on those.

[00:07:39] Roger Devine: And if you can get away with just doing that, just do that because that's a better way to do things. You know, it's much more efficient. But if you're going to need the help. smaller donors, if you're gonna need the help of mid-sized donors, if you wanna incorporate donor cultivation into the the mix here.

[00:08:01] Roger Devine: Events are one great way to develop donors. You can bring them in, you have them captive for a couple of hours. You can introduce your programs to them and you can cater to what it would take to bring them along the pathway. I, I think one of the things that a lot of higher education development directors get caught up in with events, you know, events are not the most popular way to raise money.

[00:08:28] Roger Devine: just aren't. Right. And that's for a couple of reasons. Their work and many development directors wind up thinking like, at best I'm gonna break even, you know, because, because I have to. And then when they're thinking about the things that they have to do for a gala, they're naturally thinking about their biggest donors.

[00:08:50] Roger Devine: They're thinking about, what do I have to do to impress the fattest of the fat wallets in the room? Right. And that makes sense. That's really good strategy there. That's where you're gonna get a lot of your money. But if you wanna do donor cultivation as well, you need to, you need to probably change some of the positioning so that you are designing the event for the younger donors or the smaller donors for the mid-size donors that you want to progress through your donor development cycle.

[00:09:22] Roger Devine: There. And this is where I get to a point that I'm, I I make a lot of times regarding galas, they don't have to be break even. At best, they should be run as fundraisers. They should be run as enterprises that are gonna be a net positive to the organization. And they can be. They absolutely can be.

[00:09:47] Roger Devine: You don't have to make them into the highest of high-end galas with ice sculptures everywhere and what have you. You really don't. And I'll tell you, elementary school, PTAs, churches, local food banks figured this out a long, long time ago. They use events very effectively to do fundraising. It seems like it's just been.

[00:10:10] Roger Devine: More of an issue at the high end events. Kind of have a, a little bit of a reputation problem up there, and I'm hoping to change that a little bit. You know, I, I don't think it should necessarily, like I say, it should never replace those those donor cultivation efforts that are already going on. Events should never replace those, but they can be an important part of the mix right now.

[00:10:36] Roger Devine: Especially in an environment where federal grants are being placed under review and canceled and revised, and there is downstream pressure on private foundations to make up the difference for the federal grants. And everybody's kind of reassessing here. And in a time like this, I tend to think that events where you spread this out, you are, you are trying to cultivate the largest number of people to participate in a fundraiser rather than.

[00:11:05] Roger Devine: The strategic people. You want the largest number of people in here. You know, I think there's a place for that in the fundraising mix at higher education and at at other places. And we, we do work with a lot of universities, you know, including the one where I went and got my MBA, they were kind enough to become a customer afterwards, and I work really closely with them as a result.

[00:11:26] Cheryl Broom: You know, you make such a great point because we see this in the political sphere, especially in the last decade, that. Candidates that are often the most successful are ones that have a whole lot of small donations, right? Everybody wants the big donations, but the grassroots fundraising, the small, the five, the 10, the 15, the $50 donations, they can really add up and make a difference.

[00:11:51] Cheryl Broom: And. I love that you said, you know, you don't need to do, you don't need to do a fundraiser with a ice sculpture and trapeze artists and it, it can be something simple and successful. What kind of things have you seen that have been working well for organizations? 

[00:12:12] Roger Devine: Well, I'm gonna tell you about my favorite event that I have seen at the university level. It happens here at Portland State University, where I got my MBA Go Vikings. and it's with their music school. Their music, the campuses campus wide license. We work with a lot of different schools and teams to do their individual fundraisers, but the one that's really closest to my heart is the music school.

[00:12:36] Roger Devine: One small event, usually about 125 to 150 guests pretty well cultivated. And. The music school has students perform four songs during the course of this and they space 'em out. They don't do it as a concert. It's just like, let's hear from the, the students again, and the students are all dressed to the nines.

[00:13:00] Roger Devine: These are people, these are 20 year olds who don't really know how to wear formal wear, but they got some and they put it on, and everybody loves to look at them looking a little awkward, and then they sing beautifully and everybody's there. For the singing, everybody's there to support the school. The only kind of auction they do is that they will auction off private performances by the students.

[00:13:25] Roger Devine: They'll usually do one or two of those, and those go for big, big, big money in the, in the audience. And then they do a special appeal and they're over with the whole thing in about two hours. It's really a compact event. And every year we get people in and out of there, and they're all just gushing over how wonderful the singing was on the way out the door, which is of course, the mindset we want them to be in when they're leaving the event.

[00:13:54] Roger Devine: Right? We want them to think that this was not a fundraiser I went to. This was the best event on my social calendar this week, you know? And. Then maybe they'll buy tickets next year and you, you continue to move them along.

[00:14:07] Cheryl Broom: That's such a great example and also an example of how you don't have to fundraise for your entire organization at every event. 

[00:14:15] Roger Devine: Oh, 

[00:14:15] Cheryl Broom: focus on music or athletics and you can make events that are relevant. Like I, one of my favorite events to attend as a business owner for one of our clients does a golf tournament to support athletic scholarships and we have to get our tickets.

[00:14:30] Cheryl Broom: It's the tournament's in April and she just sent, sent the save the date out in September. 'cause she sells out every single year. She sells out December and. 

[00:14:39] Roger Devine: The thing about golf tournaments, which are great fundraising events, is that they usually have a cap on the audience 144. That's usually about any of the maximum number of golfers that can and then you hope to pat around it with, you know, people coming for dinner afterwards.

[00:14:53] Cheryl Broom: Yes. Yeah, exactly. And that's exactly what the event is. And we actually skip outta dinner. I hope she's not. Listen, she, she's totally gonna listen to this podcast, by the way, because she's a fundraiser. We do skip out dinner, but I always participate in the auction. So do the, and in fact I am going to a comedy show this weekend that I 

[00:15:13] Cheryl Broom: won in her auction.

[00:15:14] Cheryl Broom: So she got us golfing And she got us bidding on a package. So,

[00:15:18] Roger Devine: And you're gonna use the package. That's good 

[00:15:20] Cheryl Broom: Yeah, it's, there's always great things going on there. So what are, what are some tips for those organizations out there that are looking to start a really manageable event? Maybe they haven't done anything before and they're looking to get, to get started.

[00:15:35] Cheryl Broom: What tips do you have for them? 

[00:15:37] Roger Devine: Definitely start small. You are gonna need to introduce the concept of an annual fundraising event to your donor database. They're gonna need to start learning that this is a thing you're gonna do and this is about how you're gonna do it. And so your first year is gonna be a warmup here. Really you, you know, you should aim to make some money.

[00:16:00] Roger Devine: You should always aim to make some money, but I wouldn't necessarily count on it for enormous money the first year. First year, maybe all you're doing is you're establishing that you're gonna hold a fundraising event. Maybe the first one you only do online. Do an online silent auction about the simplest possible thing you can do.

[00:16:19] Roger Devine: You know, get some donated items, put 'em up online. Define a bidding period. Go. If you wanna add a gala, if you want to have people get together in person, and personally, I think there's a lot of reason to do so. Community works really well as a tool for fundraising. So getting people together to enjoy each other's company is, is a good idea if you're gonna do that.

[00:16:42] Roger Devine: You know, then you start with maybe a, maybe a silent auction. Maybe you also do a raffle and then add things in. As you get your feet underneath, you establish first that you're gonna be able to mount the event. You're going to be able to move guests through the event efficiently, and you're going to be able to get paid.

[00:17:03] Roger Devine: Efficiently at the end. Those are the first three things you have to establish out there. Then once you've done that, you can start adding in things to further stimulate the fundraising. Maybe this is when you add in signup parties, or you add in a big raffle, or you add in, you know, maybe you add, this is where you add in a live auction.

[00:17:24] Roger Devine: As soon as you can get to the point where you can add in a live auction, as soon as you get to the point where you can have an event with a mediator up on stage, then you can hold a special appeal. And I presume that everybody here has done a special appeal and therefore knows that there are insanely great fundraising moments.

[00:17:46] Roger Devine: Give you a little statistic. Over the last 20 years looking at our customer database, if an event had a special appeal as part of its fundraising, then that special appeal was worth about 50% of what the event raised. 

[00:18:00] Cheryl Broom: Oh wow. 

[00:18:01] Roger Devine: Yeah, so that's where you're getting to. You wanna get to a point where you're definitely able to use that particular tool, the special appeal with a particular good, well developed crowd in front of it.

[00:18:12] Roger Devine: And that might take you two or three years to get there. If you have a small crew, you can scale faster with more staff paying attention. You can scale faster if you have a little bit larger budget, but. If somebody's really just kind of getting started and they needed to be a fundraiser the first year, which I'm way in favor of, make money from year one start with something simple that's gonna require less overhead, less labor.

[00:18:42] Roger Devine: And as you get your feet underneath you. You start reworking the events in and you know, accumulating people on staff who have experience with events, et cetera, then you can grow it, make it bigger. We do generally have like a five-year plan we can work on with, with customers. Where this is not in the software, it's just consulting that we give on the side.

[00:19:02] Roger Devine: And we do that for free for our customers because really. At the end of the day, this works for all of us if we're working with you to develop a program over years. If it's a one and done, that's nice, but you know, nobody's actually really getting anything done there.

[00:19:20] Cheryl Broom: Yeah, I think that is such sage advice, and it goes for marketing too. It's like you are not always going to hit a home run the first time you swing. Like it takes years to build something successful. And so start small and build on it and pretty soon it gets easier and easier and better and better. Yeah, well, I wanna take a quick break and listen to our sponsor EdTech Connect, and it's such a great sponsor for this episode because the EdTech Connect is a platform that was started because the owner saw a need of colleges not being able to find technology like, like yours, Roger, to support their goals.

[00:20:03] Cheryl Broom: So we're gonna listen a little bit to our sponsor and we'll be right back. Okay, so before the break, you gave some really great advice about how to start small with an annual event and build on it. And I wanna dive a little bit deeper into your tool and tools that people can use to to support their fundraising efforts.

[00:20:33] Cheryl Broom: We talked a while ago. I can't even remember. We were just talking before we started. It seems like it's been like months. We talked a little bit about fundraising software, pricing models, and I wanted for you to explain to the audience, you know, what they're, what they should be looking for, when they're looking for support and what some of these different models are.

[00:20:54] Roger Devine: Yeah, there are three big pricing models that are, are prevalent in our industry. The one that I prefer, and we have done base, we have, we have provisioned our software on this basis for 20 years is as an annual subscription, an annual fixed fee subscription, where an a school would pay upfront a license fee to use the software for the year, and then there are no variable costs associated with it other than credit card processing.

[00:21:22] Roger Devine: Unfortunately, I can't stop the credit card processing banks from charging for their services. So that's gonna happen. But other than that, it's a fixed fee. The organization gets to use the software for a full year across multiple fundraisers, et cetera, et cetera. I find that to be a really cost effective way to go.

[00:21:39] Roger Devine: It does require a little bit more of an investment upfront. You have to pay the full SaaS fee upfront, and since that's all we are getting paid, we have to charge at a level that allows us to stay in business and hopefully make a little bit of money, but. Not too much. We're dealing with nonprofits. I can't make too much money.

[00:21:55] Roger Devine: So the the second pricing model is kind of the historical pricing model where organizations pay some fee upfront, but then they also pay the software company, not the credit card processor that's separate, but the software company, they'll pay 'em a percentage of what they raise. So it might be that I charge you some nominal fee upfront.

[00:22:19] Roger Devine: Say 79 bucks, but then I'm really getting paid by charging you 3% of what you raise. And that's in addition to credit card processing fees. This is great for smaller groups that wanna get started out at a. Low commitment. The price scales with the fundraising activity or the fundraising success that's appealing to a lot of people.

[00:22:42] Roger Devine: I think it's a legitimate way to go. We do also sell our software on that basis. If, you know, in, for groups that are just getting started there's a third business model out there and it's the one I wanna warn everybody off of. It is relatively new to our industry. It popped up about three, four years ago.

[00:23:00] Roger Devine: I think it's insidious and it's a business model that seems really great. Where they go to an organization, the two companies that, that pursue this business model, and we'll say, you can have our software for free. You don't even have to pay credit card processing charges. You just get for free. It's just yours.

[00:23:17] Roger Devine: We wanna help, we wanna build schools. We want, we're in this for the good of the country. Okay. As marketers, I'm suspicious, but you know, and here's the trick. They reserve the right to ask every guest at the auction for a tip, and they, they are software developers. They're good with user interfaces.

[00:23:41] Roger Devine: User interfaces can be designed, as we all know, as marketers, to manipulate towards certain outcomes, and they're very good at asking for tips, and they will, the main company that does this, they'll put it on their website. They'll say that 95% of your guests will tip a full 15% of their bill. Now these companies take that money for themselves.

[00:24:06] Roger Devine: It does not even flow through a nonprofit, so those tips are not tax deductible. And if you do the math, your entire fundraising community is paying an enormous amount, far more than you would pay in a license fee. And you may think, I don't care. I'm not paying it. It's the guests, they're paying it. But really those guests are the ones who are taking their wallets out to support you.

[00:24:33] Roger Devine: So if they weren't paying that, it might be more for you. And be 

[00:24:38] Cheryl Broom: clear you're paying the software company. 'cause I've come across that and listening to you talk. I'm like, I don't, I know that I've tipped and I didn't realize what I was doing. to the end. And you're just clicking buttons too. 

[00:24:52] Roger Devine: Yeah, well, and see, the thing is, is that the mechanism is ingenious and it works pretty well. So when we saw this come out, we decided we wanted to build a tipping feature in, but we did it differently where the tips don't pay any vendors directly. They're just extra fundraising for the organization.

[00:25:09] Roger Devine: So the organization can cover their bills later on. 

[00:25:12] Cheryl Broom: Right. 

[00:25:13] Roger Devine: And I think that's fine. And if you can use the tipping mechanism to squeeze a few more bucks outta your guests for the organization at the end of the night, that's great. Having them paying the vendors directly when what they think they're doing is supporting your organization is a little underhanded.

[00:25:28] Roger Devine: I dislike that model intensely.

[00:25:31] Cheryl Broom: Well, that's great advice and something for everybody to look out for, not just for when they're looking for software platforms, but also when they're making 

[00:25:39] Roger Devine: Yeah, when you're making a donation at the, at the event, you know, I, you know, I, I really don't like the message that it sends from an organization to the guest. Should the guest find out what's going on, you know, like you've just sort of realized what's going on here, and now you can map that back and think, hey.

[00:26:01] Roger Devine: Why, why weren't, why weren't they paying for the software license? Why were, why were they relying on all of us to cover it for them?

[00:26:09] Cheryl Broom: So it sounds like funding model. How do you fund your softwares? Is a great question to ask. When you're interviewing a a, any vendor, really any fundraiser vendor, are there anything else that people should be asking or looking out for as they, as they work with different vendors and organizations to support their fundraising? 

[00:26:27] Roger Devine: you really wanna know in advance, in a detailed way, what is available to you, what you might have to pay extra for, how things, how you're going to be supported, both before the event and then during the event. how late that support goes. know, on event night, you really should be able to get telephone support up until midnight or so, 

[00:26:52] Cheryl Broom: Oh, that's very true. Yes. The goes down. Who's gonna be there? 

[00:26:56] Roger Devine: who's gonna be there, you know?

[00:26:58] Roger Devine: And it's usually on a Saturday night. Et cetera, et cetera. When we got into the business 20 something years ago, every company that was already in it had a reputation for terrible customer support. That's changed. That is no longer what I will tell everybody. Everybody's gotten a little bit better.

[00:27:17] Roger Devine: But I will say that that was something that on day one, we decided was a differentiator that was available to us. It was something that if we wanted to seize that and use it to market our company, it was available. We could do that. And so, given that we are a scrappy, bootstrapped company, we decided we would grab any differentiator we could.

[00:27:40] Roger Devine: And it's less of a differentiator 20 years later than it once was, but it is still probably the most important thing to ask about. I would say that, you know, there's, there's various feature sets that I could talk about the value of, but really that's gonna be a decision on an individual organization basis.

[00:27:59] Roger Devine: For the most part, understand how you're gonna be billed, how credit cards are gonna be processed, what the support is and. I do like to say about my competitors that you can run a successful event with any of their software. You absolutely can. You're not gonna go wrong in terms of the ability to produce a functioning event regardless of what you choose.

[00:28:25] Roger Devine: So focus on the business models, focus on how the software company gets paid. Understand that, understand that nobody is giving you your their software. You may be doing good in the world and that's great, but those of us that work on it for a living need to get paid. So we will charge you something. And it's just, you know, if it looks too good to be true and all of the costs are hidden, you gotta do a little work.

[00:28:50] Roger Devine: You gotta probe a little harder. You gotta really understand it before you get into bed with 'em.

[00:28:55] Cheryl Broom: right.

[00:28:55] Cheryl Broom: Excellent advice. Well, I've really, really enjoyed our conversation. I think this is such a relevant topic to so much of our audience. And before we sign off, I, everybody loves real world examples and you gave such a great example from Portland State, and we didn't get a chance to talk about Eastern Washington's 

[00:29:15] Roger Devine: Oh, we 

[00:29:16] Cheryl Broom: And love for you to share that with the audience. 

[00:29:18] Roger Devine: Eastern Washington did a great thing a few years ago, and it stretched us. It pushed us a little bit. They were gonna do an auction of signed jerseys during a football game. I mean, during the football game, actually during halftime, but they wanted everybody in the stadium to stay in their seats and look at the jumbo tron and bid using their phones.

[00:29:42] Roger Devine: And it was like, God, that's fun. That's amazing. So we built a display to help coordinate for the jumbo tron. And then we had to be very careful in timing, you know, the invitations going out. We had to be careful about the network load because if you think about it. There's not that many cell towers immediately around a stadium.

[00:30:04] Roger Devine: You don't wanna overload them. But it was, it turned out great. It was so much fun. Yeah. And they made money, made a lot of money.

[00:30:11] Cheryl Broom: That is great. It's, and it sounds 

[00:30:13] Cheryl Broom: so easy, but I'm sure it wasn't as easy as it

[00:30:17] Cheryl Broom: sounds 

[00:30:17] Roger Devine: know, it wasn't the most complicated fundraiser. It was a relatively straightforward one. I mean, it had some technical challenges, but we were eager for those. It's like, that's cool. Let's do something. Let's do something big here. 

[00:30:29] Cheryl Broom: that's what you live for is solving problems. 

[00:30:32] Roger Devine: Yeah. And they had, they had eight people participate in this silent auction.

[00:30:37] Roger Devine: That's a big audience. So.

[00:30:41] Cheryl Broom: Well, great example. And Roger, thank you so much for being a guest. If people wanna learn more about schoolauction.net or get in touch with you, what's the best way for for them to do that?

[00:30:50] Roger Devine: Well, the website is www.schoolauction.net. Let's start there. you can always get in touch with me. You can find me all over the place there, reach out. We'd love to talk to you. And you know, I'll give you my email address. It's simply roger@schoolauction.net, and I'll talk to anybody. Gimme a call.

[00:31:10] Roger Devine: Tell me about your program. Tell me what you wanna do, tell me your frustrations. We'll figure something out.

[00:31:17] Cheryl Broom: Love it. Well, thank you so much for being a guest. 

[00:31:19] Roger Devine: I appreciate Cheryl. Thank you so much for having me.