Working with auction software and LGL
In this article:
Overview
Little Green Light has robust event features (see this article about events), but LGL is not designed to manage auctions. If you are running an auction of any significant size, you will likely need to use specialized auction software to help you run the event. What you can do, though, is coordinate your work between LGL and your auction software.
You can use Little Green Light as your permanent repository of information about your supporters and their contributions, including contributions made to your auctions: items they’ve contributed and donations they’ve made at the auction. Many organizations also choose to store auction “purchases” in LGL as well, but that is optional for your donor management system given that those purchases are not necessarily an indication of philanthropic intent.
You will use your auction software to run the auction itself. This includes the management of your catalog of items in the auction, bidding, and payments made at the auction. Depending on your auction software solution, you could run all of your registrations there as well, or you could use LGL for that part.
Once the auction has completed, you can export the list of attendees and their contributions from your auction software and import that data into LGL.
One of the trickiest elements here will be dealing with households. Many auction solutions use household records to group couples together. As you likely know, Little Green Light does not have the concept of a “household record”; instead LGL uses “primary” and “spouse/partner” contact types (see this article on managing households in LGL). If your auction software uses household records, we recommend you think of the “primary” constituents you have in LGL as your “household” in the auction software. That will make the all-important matching of imports and exports much simpler. In other words, even if you have two records for a couple in LGL, you would export only the “primary” constituent record to your auction software. This way, when you import the results back into LGL, it will be easy to match to the correct records.
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Working with specific auction software services
Little Green Light has partnered with two auction software companies to make coordinating your LGL work with your auction work easier.
Auctria
Auctria is an auction and event platform that has created a custom transaction export you can easily import into LGL. See this help article for details.
Greater Giving
Greater Giving is an auction and event platform, and we describe how you can export and import data between LGL and Greater Giving using their standard features. (See this help article for details.)