I’m Gale Wilcox. I’m one of the co-Founders of Mi Work Matters, and I currently serve as the Secretary on the Board of Directors. Mi Work Matters engages in extremely important work—helping employees with disabilities find employment. We serve Wayne and Oakland counties in Michigan.
We became Qgiv users when a volunteer suggested we add a silent auction to our golf outing, and this is our second year using the Qgiv platform to host the auction with no issues whatsoever. The golf outing this year was more successful than last year’s—we raised about $30,000 with about $5,000 of the income coming from the silent auction.
Regarding onboarding and the Help Desk, Qgiv is off the charts—just wonderful! The free, one-on-one training we received was very good and very easy to follow. Anytime we had a question, we got a response almost immediately. I can’t tell you how good that made me feel as the the lead for the golf outing to know that whoever was running the silent auction had a whole team behind them to help them prepare.
The resources and training helped put my mind at ease in case our main event volunteer didn’t make it. I’d easily be able to jump in because of access to the easy-to-understand resources on the Help Desk and as a result, I felt confident going into the event.
To ensure everything went smoothly on the day of the event as the golfers arrived and got registered to bid, we had our trained volunteer on hand to help answer questions. Most of the attendees were returning golfers, and since this was our 2nd year using Qgiv, they knew how to log in and set up the Givi app on their cell phones.
One difference between this year and last year’s outing was that we decided to open the auction to non-golfers. We were a little apprehensive at first, going back and forth about how to handle delivering items to any non-golfers that might potentially win. Luckily, a volunteer offered to handle item delivery to non-golfers.
With delivery logistics taken care of, we decided to move forward with opening the auction up, and I’m glad we did! I think that’s the reason that we were able to raise more money this year, even though we had fewer golfers and teams register compared to last year’s event.
As far as favorite features, our main auction volunteer loved being able to see the auction results in real time. Watching bids in real time put a smile on her face because it was so much fun to watch everyone trying to outbid each other.
In fact, the Executive Team and Executive Board Members that were there ended up crowding around our main auction volunteer right before the auction closed to see who was going to win because they had bid on items! All in all, the bidders were highly competitive, especially when it came to bidding on a custom-made table that one of our volunteers created as a one-of-kind piece for the winner. There was so much interest and attention from the golfers when it came to the silent auction, and it has been a great addition to the golf outing.
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