CiviAuction: An offline auction management system ...

Some personal info to set the background: I have two kids who started kindergarden and pre-k earlier this year. We've also been involved with the KidZone Museum (in truckee, ca). Small schools and museums have a large part of their annual budget come in via live auctions. I did a bit of digging around and could not find any open source software that addresses this sort of fund raiser auctions. However there are quite a few commercial providers with software that addresses this market. I had a pretty detailed conversation with Spin from Auction IT Wizard who's built a good PDA based system to make auction management and ticketing much easier and signficantly faster at the site. He was interested in building a PHP/MySQL backend to collect and manage the data pre/post auction. Based on his requirements i figured Drupal/Joomla/CiviCRM did a fair amount of this already and with the additional CiviAuction component would help meet the requirement. I've started a wiki page documenting the CiviAuction requirements. My main goal is to get an effective (and complete) management system for offline auctions. Support for online auctions (for live auctions) will be part of phase 2 (or later in phase 1) but is not the main goal. Some of the high level goals are:

• Set up an auction along with configuration options, start/end dates and text/html for the emails that the system generates.
• Upload items along with values for the auction. Ability to have multiple items be part of a larger auction group
• Approval process to approve items (and send a thank you note to donor)
• Generate Auction Catalog
• Upload auction winners and send notification/thank you letter
• Record payments and link to winning bids, send out a receipt

If you are interested in having this functionality and/or you run your school/org's auctions, please help out and add your requirements / use-case(s) to the wiki page. We can reuse the code from the Personal Campaign Pages (PCP) for the auction item upload and also from the event module to set up / configure the actual auction

Comments

I've had the same idea. Drupal / Joomla / CiviCRM would provide a great foundation for an auction management system.

My wife and I are heavily involved in a grade school gala auction in March and will be co-chairing the event in 2010. The event has been using MaestroSoft for the past couple of events. It has really streamlined the data entry, auction item management, and checkout process. The application is rather pricey and maintenance is $200 / year. An open source alternative would help organizations keep more of their hard earned dollars.

I have build a couple of sites using Drupal and have fell in love with it. I've been looking for a way to join the great community that keeps improving & extending the system.

- Blue K Design

Did this ever go anywhere? My kid's preschool is using a spreadsheet for auction management, and eTapestry for the rest. We already have PHP hosting, and I'd love to be able to recommend CiviCRM to replace it all.

 

there did not seem to many people who wanted this, so we dropped it :(

I just posted about this in the forum to see if there's any renewed interest. Anyone who's interested, please chime in at http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,32401.msg138537.html#msg138537.