Examples of High Dollar "Ego Items"
“Ego” Items gain importance in School Auctions.
I read an article on the Wall Street Journals Website about how important PTA Auctions in New York were becoming in this age of Education Budget cuts.
It mentioned a parent volunteer that had been involved in her child’s school for years all the way back to Pre-K. Beacon School on West 61st in Manhattan is a New York Public School that is a high quality alternative to private education and in order to stay current and competitive raises money for the wide variety of extra curricular activities, arts programs and sports teams.
The School has decided that the annual school auction — the crown jewel of Parent Associations — is the best way to raise a lot of money in one night. They work and plan all year to prepare for the Auction with a six figure goal in mind There items were inspired and I thought I might share them with you. We always talk about “Ego Items” in the Auctions we work on and these are excellent examples!
Internships: Nothing seems to garner parents’ attention like internships. At the Dwight School on West 89th Street in Manhattan, parents had the chance to help their kids bypass the interview process and purchase a summer internship at Bobbi Brown Cosmetics, donated by Maureen Case, president of specialty brands at Estée Lauder Co. Starting bid: $6,000. And besides reaping work experience, the Bobbi Brown intern is paid $400 a week.
A $10-an-hour internship with the white-collar criminal defense group at law firm Hughes, Hubbard & Reed, donated by partner Edward Little, started at $2,500. A research internship with Professor Ray Horton, director of the Social Enterprise Program at Columbia Business School, started bids at $2,000—but the internship itself is unpaid.
A student at Poly Prep Country Day School in Brooklyn will work on a CoverGirl ad at Grey New York this summer, donated by the advertising agency’s executive vice president Alice Ericsson. Students at Manhattan’s Upper West Side Anderson School will get a glimpse of what it is like to work for Google or the United Nations with employee-run private tours of their offices.
Celebrity Appeal: Adrian Grenier, an alumnus of LaGuardia and star of HBO series Entourage, will invite a guest to stay in Los Angeles for three nights at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel and have lunch on the “Entourage” set.
News junkies at the Collegiate School on West 78th Street in Manhattan bid on a conversation about foreign affairs with CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour and her husband, James Rubin, former assistant secretary of state. Rob Brown, Poly Prep alum and star of HBO series “Treme,” will take auction winners to lunch.
At Loyola School in Manhattan, crime writer James Patterson will use the winning bidder’s name as a character in an upcoming thriller. For politicos at Staten Island Academy, New York Sen. Andrew Lanza auctioned off a private breakfast meeting. Eye-Catching: Manhattan’s Mandell School head Gabriella Rowe will lead 12 people on a duck-hunting expedition in Melbrook, N.Y., followed by a round of scotch and cigars. At LaGuardia, parents bid on the chance for famous male voice-over artist and alum Les Marshak to record the outgoing message on their answering machine. At Bard High School Early College on East Houston Street in Manhattan, a bidder scored a walk-on part in Broadway musical, “Hair.”
Other “Ego Items”
Brooklyn Friends School parent and dog psychic Christine Agro auctioned off a one-hour consultation for the downtown Brooklyn school.
Car lovers at Staten Island Academy started bidding at $4,000 for five hours driving a collection of sports cars, such as a Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano and Lamborghini LP560. Emergency Tuition:
In case Wall Street hasn’t rebounded fast enough for some families, bids also border on the charitable. At Loyola, where tuition starts at $28,000, parents bid on temporary assistance to families that have experienced a “recent and dramatic change in financial circumstances” and can’t pay tuition, according to auction materials. Other options include providing support for scholarship students to attend an in-house SAT-prep program.
What I did not see in the article was the mention of a “Paddles Up” program or a “Fund a Need”.
I also noticed that an actor not a professional Auctioneer conducted the Auction.
The result? $140,000 for the weekend Auction. This is not a paltry sum but one that could have been doubled with a few ideas and a professional fundraising Auctioneer advising the committee on item order, logistics and techniques.
One quote that stuck out from the article I read:
“This is a sophisticated New York crowd, if people want to go on a fancy vacation, they’ll buy their own vacation. We have to scour for connections to things that you can’t buy,”
This is on point. The wealthy can buy all the jewelry, trips and automobiles they want. Want to get them excited? Show them something they cannot have.