How to Pick the Right Auction Software for Your Fundraising Event: Free Isn't Always Free

Free Is Never Actually Free

HelloFund founder Phil Sanger has spent nearly a decade building fundraising software for nonprofits, schools, PTAs, and booster clubs. His conversation with philanthropic adviser Brittany Morrison started with a simple observation neither of them was trying to pick a fight over: "Free, we see a lot of the free stuff, free this, free that. And of course, free is never free," Sanger said. "It's very rarely is anything in this world free. And we can't take into question our efforts with our events, with our online fundraising, with our in-person events when it comes to software, because we know all it's going to do is tick off our biggest supporters, new attendees, all that."

Morrison had a real number to back it up. Working with a volunteer-run organization that chose a free platform for its gala, she watched the software provider collect more than $12,000 in fees on a night that raised over $250,000. "While yes, this cost was getting offset for the organization, it was being put on the backs of the donor," she said. Worse, the fees bought nothing. "The organization received zero service from this provider. Zero service. And this is an entirely volunteer-run organization with no support."

Mini takeaway: A free platform didn't save this nonprofit $12,000 — it just moved the bill from the organization's budget onto its donors' credit cards, with no service in return.

Service Is the Feature Worth Paying For

For Morrison, the fee itself isn't the real issue. It's what that fee is supposed to buy. "If there's one feature that's worth paying for in my opinion, it's service. And I think that's a key differentiator," she said. "Having boots on the ground at your event, especially if it's your gala, your largest fundraising event of the year — those are things that are truly priceless in my opinion."

She's felt the gap firsthand at events without that support. "I feel like I've gotten a little spoiled working with Phil, and I go to other events and I'm like, wait, where's your boots-on-the-ground person? Or the boots-on-the-ground team, like they're just there to do the one thing. They're just there to run the check-in." Real support means being able to flag a live problem and get it solved in real time — texting guests a corrected Wi-Fi password, or pushing back a silent auction closing time when the night's schedule shifts. "The amount of chaos that created for this organization," she said of one event where an auction didn't close on schedule, "and ticked off donors about silent auction packages that they thought they won." The fallout ate up staff time for weeks afterward.

Sanger's Four Screening Questions

Before comparing prices, Sanger suggests nonprofits get specific about what they're actually shopping for. "I think it's overwhelming first off in our space because there's so many different fundraising platforms out there," he said. "If I go look on a software review site, you're going to see a hundred-plus." His starting questions: What features are you actually looking for? What type of event are you having — a PTA carnival with an auction, or a formal gala? If you've run one before, how was the check-in experience? Do you need an online auction component?

Morrison's version of due diligence goes a step further: demo it as a donor, not as an organizer. "I would always demo the donor experience. I would want to know exactly what my donor is going to see and how the ease of use feels — especially to someone who isn't accustomed to using these platforms. The less user-friendly that platform is, the less money you're going to raise." She also recommends calling a comparable organization you admire and simply asking what they use and why. "It's very difficult to find one-size-fits-all software that meets every single need," she said — so find out where a similar nonprofit landed and what tradeoffs they made.

Mini takeaway: Before you sign anything, sit down and walk through the donor's checkout experience yourself. If it confuses you, it will cost you money on event night.

Reporting, Integrations, and Payment Options Are Table Stakes

Sanger built his newest platform update by working backward from a complaint he'd fielded for two years: weak back-end reporting. "I think reporting is so important for these nonprofits," he said. "That's a big feature — data, in my opinion, is so important." Alongside reporting, he pointed to CRM integrations as a growing demand. "Integrations is something all these nonprofits want, because they have so much information in the CRM that they want to be able to move that data over in a good way." Apple Pay and Google Pay, meanwhile, have moved from nice-to-have to baseline expectation. "It's kind of a no-brainer, I think, like you kind of have to have now."

Morrison added a feature that's easy to overlook until it's missing: fundraising thermometers and drawing tools that surface a platform's own capabilities. "You know, the thermometer to be able to see — some platforms don't have that, or they don't really show you all the capabilities the platform even offers. So you're like trying to find find where things are like as a volunteer." Raffle name-drawing built into the software, rather than handled manually, was another small feature she flagged as a real time-saver on event night.

A concrete story drove the point home. Morrison was chairing an 1,100-person event that raises a million dollars annually when her girlfriend — who works in tech and software sales — tried to register and couldn't find a clear path to enter her credit card. "This platform is terrible. It's so clunky," her friend told her. "Those types of things mean that you're missing out, you know, truly on on dollars given to the organization," Morrison said. "I know it sounds like remedial, but some of these providers — it is antiquated. It isn't easy to use, and that's why you have to demo that donor experience. I'm going to beat that into the ground."

Transparency of Fees Is a Feature, Not an Afterthought

Morrison's other non-negotiable is knowing exactly what a platform charges and why, before the event goes live. "Transparency of fees — like we talk about free, we talk about paid, but like what does that even look like when you go in to create an event through a software platform?" She described the frustration of not being able to tell where features live inside a dashboard, or why an optional tip keeps resetting itself back on. "You don't want to be getting messages from your donors asking why am I paying $370 in fees for this package that I purchased," she said. Some organizations don't even realize they can offer donors a check-payment alternative to avoid processing fees entirely — a workaround many platforms bury or never mention.

Sanger's advice for comparing platforms on price echoes the same principle: don't stop at the sticker on the free option. "Look at one that's got like an annual or monthly fee, too. Don't just look at the free — look at the other options too, because the one that's got an annual fee of $1,000 or whatever it is may be cheaper for you in the long run." Credit card processing rates, he noted, are close to identical across most providers — so the real cost difference usually lives in what a flat fee buys you in support, reporting, and features that a percentage-based free model doesn't include.

Online Bidding Extends Your Reach Beyond the Room

When a longtime attendee asked whether it was worth switching from paper bid sheets and Square checkout to an online bidding system, Morrison didn't dismiss the hesitation. "Change is hard, right? And so like I definitely understand the — I would kind of follow up and ask some more questions about what she's doing now with the bid sheets for the event and displays." But she made the fundraising case directly: online and mobile bidding let a nonprofit market its auction or raffle beyond the people physically in the room. She pointed to a golf cart raffle her organization ran that sold tickets across an entire metro area, not just to attendees. "That was a huge revenue generator for that campaign," she said. "You are absolutely missing out on marketing your auction or your raffle to people outside of your attendees" without that capability.

There's an accessibility dimension too. "You may have a family or a donor that couldn't attend the event, but they still want to feel like they're a part of it, and that's a great vehicle for them to be able to do that," Morrison said. A QR code on a single display card can replace a stack of paper bid sheets, cutting the manual entry burden on volunteers while opening the door to donors who simply couldn't make it that night.

Mini takeaway: Online bidding isn't just a convenience upgrade — it's a way to sell to people who were never going to walk through your door.

The Real Number One Mistake

Asked to name the single biggest mistake nonprofits make when choosing event technology, Sanger and Morrison converged on the same idea from different angles. Sanger's answer focused on comparison shopping: "Not looking at all the options... you need to at least, you know, if you're looking at one of those free options, I would also look at another option that isn't free."

Morrison went straight at the mindset behind the decision. "If you pick on price alone, I mean, you get what you pay for. You're undercutting the value of your time. That is the number one mistake. You are trading one problem for another." The money saved by choosing the cheapest or "free" option, she argued, doesn't disappear — it just resurfaces later as staff hours spent untangling reconciliation errors, donor complaints about surprise fees, and missed revenue from a clunky checkout flow. "It's a mindset — it truly is a mindset shift," she said. "The number one mistake is just failing to see from the outset that you're going to be spending the money. It's just coming in the form of your time and stress, and potentially and likely, I would say, missed fundraising opportunities."

The takeaway for any nonprofit shopping for auction or event software isn't that free platforms are automatically wrong — it's that the sticker price is only one line item in the real cost. Support, reporting, integrations, fee transparency, and donor-side ease of use all show up on the ledger eventually, whether the software itself carries a monthly invoice or not.

Insights in this article are drawn from the Hey Nonprofits! LIVE episode “How to Pick the Right Auction Software for Your Fundraising Event”, featuring philanthropic adviser Brittany Morrison and HelloFund founder Phil Sanger.