Auction totals and the plan for Game Day

 

Once again, our community came through.

This past weekend's ninth annual #Dominicstrong online auction raised a whopping $9,639, which I should note is $350 more than we announced during a live video reveal Monday night.

Why the discrepancy? Turns out I had a mistake on my auction spreadsheet, not counting the last four items until one of them gave a few dollars more than they'd bid, prompting me to notice that the official total didn't change when I entered it.

Yes, I've gone back and checked that this has never happened on any of the other auctions we've run.

The total of the 108 items (actually 119 - 11 items had duplicates which were won by second-place bids) was $8,639. The other $1,000 came from an item that was intended to be in the auction, but sold privately hours before I was about to post it. Ray, who had wanted it in the auction, donated the proceeds so we're counting it in the total. What an incredible gesture!

Aside from my spreadsheet snafu, this year's auction was smooth like butter. It's only Wednesday but the auction room is mostly empty. Everyone's come to pick up their winnings! We started a week later than usual but the total came in higher than 2022. Huge thumbs-up to everyone who played a part - whether you just shared the auction, donated, bid, helped behind the scenes, anything. Thank you.

Now to what's next: Last year we ran a public 24-hour charity game day for the first time in years. We had a sponsor. Lined up a whole separate mini-auction. Set up gaming stations and challenges and just a ton of effort from our group to make it happen. Got great publicity. And we didn't raise much different that day than any of our non-public game days. It was fun, but every game day is fun. I can't justify all the extra effort.

So, this year we're not going to do a public game day. Friends and family only. We'll live-stream (Nov. 4-5) as much of it as we can, and I'll blog and do social media about it, but really we'd like to see folks inspired to do their own Extra Life events.

Our hero is Dominic. You probably have your own reason to give back to a children's hospital. Go tell the world about it. Go do something good; we're right alongside you. Sign up at www.extra-life.org - make a team if there's a group of you doing it together! And if Dominic really is your reason for doing it, contact me and I'd be happy to have you on our team.