New Auction Items: Hot Air Balloon Flight and Tesla Luxury in the Hunter Valley

In need of special auction items to drive a more interesting and effective fundraising auction? Our team is always looking for new and exciting auction items for fundraisers and we are proud to announce TWO brand-new, local experience packages, available now.

Experience and holiday packages as auction items can offer a unique, stand-out touch to your live or silent auction. This can conjure interest from more guests to encourage participation in your auction and result in more funds raised for your cause.

More about these new special auction items:

Hot Air Balloon Flight for 2 and 2-Nights’ Accommodation
Your auction winner will experience the fun and unique sensation of a hot air balloon ride. The 4-hour experience, with minimum 60 minutes of flight time includes a gourmet champagne Breakfast, in-flight digital photo pack and complimentary transfers. Next to this, your auction winner will get to spend two nights (with late checkout) in a fully renovated studio room with ensuite bathroom at the Hunter Valley ‘Wine Country Retreat’. The estate is set on 60,000sqm of natural beauty. Included is an outdoor swimming pool, gym, sauna, daily continental Breakfast, and a unique Wine Experience at the Tamburlaine Winery!

Tesla Luxury in the Vines for 6
Your auction winner will enjoy a private, chauffeured and guided Wine Tour to world-class wineries and local hidden gems in a luxurious, zero-emission Tesla Model X! Included in this amazing experience is a 2-night midweek (Monday – Thursday) stay at the Hunter Valley’s famed ‘Wine Country Retreat’ across three fully renovated studio rooms. The estate is set on 60,000sqm of natural beauty and includes an outdoor swimming pool, gym, sauna and daily continental Breakfast.

As always, we can offer all of our auction items at no cost to your event budget (consignment). Contact our team for more information, terms, and conditions, and how to add these auction items to your next fundraising auction.

Helping Hand Group has raised and donated $110,000,000!

Our team is proud to announce that Helping Hand Group has hit a new milestone – $110 million raised by our fundraising silent and live auction services and fantastic range of auction items!

Since 1997, Helping Hand Group has strived to provide the best fundraising auction solutions. Supported by experienced staff and outstanding auction items, our goal has been to excite event guests and promote auction bidding while taking the stress and workload off our clients’ plate. Our service has expanded over the past two decades to include the award-winning Last Donors Standing and the brand new $10,000 Golden Hand Paddle (read more about them here). These programs, along with our continuous sourcing of unique, bespoke auction items and friendly, experienced staff have been the key to running successful fundraising auctions.

We look forward to many more years of hard work by helping our clients maximise their fundraising potential!

Helping Hand Group Launches the $10,000 Golden Hand Paddle

Jumpstart your fundraising event with up to $10,000 to encourage your guests to participate in your live auction.

Introducing Helping Hand Group’s $10,000 Golden Hand Paddle.

Helping Hand Group is excited to announce a brand new add-on service for fundraising events that improves guest participation and guarantees you up to $10,000 added to your fundraising total. Named the $10,000 Golden Hand Paddle, the program is uniquely suited for fundraising events with a live auction component. It adds an exciting, fun dynamic that encourages participation in the fundraising portion of your event. Best of all, Helping Hand Group’s expert fundraising event team can facilitate the program on your behalf — as always, free of charge!

How it works:

1. The program is a raffle. At the start of your fundraising event, 100 Golden Hand tickets are sold for $100 each.

2. The Golden Hand Pot starts to grow until all tickets are sold to amass a total of $10,000. If it is not possible to sell all 100 tickets, the Golden Hand Pot becomes the total amount collected (ie. if 50 tickets are sold, the Golden Hand Pot becomes $5,000).

3. The Golden Hand Pot then becomes a prize for one lucky Golden Hand Ticket holder that is drawn out just before the start of your live auction.

4. The winner receives the amount of the Golden Hand Pot as credit that must be used in the live auction. They will also receive a special Golden Hand Paddle that they will use in the live auction to signal their bids.

5. The Golden Hand Paddle holder will add an exciting dynamic each time they hold up the Golden Hand Paddle to bid in the auction. It will entice fun back-and-forth bidding rivalries with other participants. Your auctioneer can also have fun with it when working the crowd.

6. In the end, the $10,000 is added to Bids places in your Auction, and not paid out as cash. This can increase your fundraising total by more than $10,000, as the Golden Hand Paddle winner drives up the prices of Auction prizes they win, and also those they do not!

It is essential that your team of Golden Hand ticket sellers are gregarious, love to sell and love your mission. This will help to increase the number of tickets sold and the total amount in the Golden Hand Pot. Helping Hand Group provides an expert team of fundraising event staff to sell Golden Hand tickets for you and can also work alongside eager individuals from your team to sell as many tickets as possible and set you up for success. Best of all, the $10,000 Golden Hand Paddle program is a complimentary add-on to Helping Hand Group’s fundraising event service.

Contact Helping Hand Group today to learn more about how this program can add a $10,000 boost to your next event’s fundraising total!

A Catch Up with Gary Vaynerchuck

Helping Hand Group Founder and Director, Richard Ernster, met up with Gary Vaynerchuk, Co-founder and CEO of VaynerMedia at the Business Squared hosted by Success Resources Australia.

Business Squared was a great event. It is the next step for any entrepreneur waiting to “go off”… from the stance and actions you must take in the digital space, to the tactics, strategies and mindset you need to apply to gain the upper hand.

Thank you to Gary Vaynerchuk for your brilliant work!

More about Business Squared: http://business-squared.com.au/

Helping Hand Group Celebrates 20 Years with Major Milestone of $100 Million Raised in Donations

Helping Hand Group, Australasia’s market leader in fundraising auctions, today announced it has now raised and donated more than AU$100 million for leading charities, community groups, schools and sporting clubs since it started 20 years ago. This has been achieved by providing a broad range of unique holidays, experiences, memorabilia (music/movies/sport), artwork and fine wines through Ballot Bidding®, silent and live auctions at over 6,000 fundraising events.

“One of the main challenges of putting on a fundraising event is the sheer effort and coordination that goes into the planning and execution,” said Richard Ernster, founder of Helping Hand Group. “This is where our services play such a pivotal role in helping organisations and charities run a successful event and bring in much needed fundraising revenue.”

Founded in 1997 in Sydney, Helping Hand Group now has nine offices across six countries throughout Asia Pacific and has operated auctions in 17 countries, from Australia to Abu Dhabi, Monaco, Singapore, Papua New Guinea, Japan and more.

Demand for Helping Hand Group’s fundraising and auction services continues to increase significantly every year, with over 400 events held in the past year alone. The company’s growth can largely be attributed to its focus on offering more unique, luxury items for auction, which achieve far better donation figures for the charities and fundraising groups it works with.

“Given the unique, money can’t buy experiences that Helping Hand Group offers, this played a pivotal role in guests pledging large bids on our auction items at our annual Foundation Ball,” said Vanessa Barry, Head of St.George Foundation.

Vital to Helping Hand Group’s success is its commitment to evolving the services it provides to auction events to keep up with changing needs. In recent years, the company has introduced its Ballot Bidding® service, which gives event guests the chance to lodge their maximum bid against the items that interest them via specifically designed ballot bidding forms. It also introduced Electronic Silent Auctions that use the latest software to allow attendees to engage instantly and directly via their mobile device during an event.

Helping Hand Group’s “Last Donors Standing” Wins Major Award

Helping Hand Group wins AREA Award CSR for Last Donors Standing

We are proud to announce that Helping Hand Group has won an Asia Responsible Entrepreneurship Award (AREA) for our Last Donors Standing program! Last Donors Standing was nominated in the Small-Medium Enterprise Corporate Social Responsibility (SME CSR) category. Helping Hand Group Founder, Richard Ernster, accepted the award in Singapore on Friday 24 June, 2016. We are delighted and honoured to have won this award and thank the AREA Group for this recognition.

With over 20 years of experience with charities and fundraising, we worked hard to formulate a new and fresh approach in the charity auction sector. Given the high penetration of live (from stage) and silent auctions, our management focused on fundraising activities that would generate the highest return to charities/CSR projects, whilst keeping an element of fun and engagement. We used our extensive knowledge to establish key concepts that would not only appeal to clients but more importantly, the end participant – guests at fundraising events.

We spent four months creating, developing, and refining the concept of Last Donors Standing. This was to ensure that the project aligned perfectly with the core ideals of the Helping Hand Group in terms of no-cost to clients and exhibited the ability to raise significant sums for charity and CSR projects.

Last Donors Standing is a Live Auction format that was developed by our management team to create a new and fresh approach in the charity auction sector. It gets the whole room involved by having the auctioneer ask all guests to stay standing through rounds of bidding for an item and continually increasing the asking price until it sells. It also allows for more than one successful bidder which in turn means the charity receives multiple donations.

Last Donors Standing took the sector by storm and easily surpassed previous outcomes (from other fundraising methods) of one or two sales of a specific auction item. Up to 10 items were sold with each sale generating a multiple donations for a charity or CSR project. The best successes to-date have been eight sales at an event in Hong Kong, benefiting Surgery for Children in Cambodia, and 10 sales at an event in Australia, seeking to find a cure for Spinal Cord Injuries!

We are proud to have successfully created a fundraising method with great sustainability. Celebrities, sports personalities and skilled auctioneers have been invited to conduct Last Donors Standing so far. This has led to high engagement and entertainment for guests and generated highly positive outcomes for our charity/CSR partners.

Ask our team for more information and how Last Donors Standing can help boost your next fundraising event!