Charity Auctions at “Seizing the Moment” Crowdfunding Platform
In June 2023, Help Needed Charitable Foundation launched a new fundraising mechanism: charity auctions. Now, anyone can offer an item for auction and the proceeds will go to a charity of their choice. This is a new way to support charities that combines excitement and reward.
A charity auction item can be anything: a subscription to a course, a set of stickers, a guitar master class or a collection of cacti. All these things acquire value and turn into concrete stories of help. That's why it was so important to position this project as "auctions for everyone," not just for philanthropists with big money.
So people's memorabilia, skills, ideas, and hobbies become support for important charitable initiatives for them.
Between June and December 2023, more than a hundred auctions have already been organized on the platform. In the most successful of them, the helmet with autographs of hackers was raffled off for 150 thousand rubles in favor of the I Believe in Miracle Foundation.
When designing the charity auctions, I kept the playful mood of the mother project, "Seizing the Moment", and introduced some unique styling elements.
Participation in a charity auction
It is as easy to participate in auctions on the platform as it is to create them. A users can:
- Save interesting auctions to "favorites", as well as find lots through a word search. I have thought over filters by the size of the bid, by region of work and by the problem solved by the fund in favor of which the auction is created.
- To make a bid, raising it by at least 1 step, which is marked by the author of the auction, or directly redeem the lot (if the author has set the redemption price). Also, the users can donate the amount of their bid voluntarily even if they don't win.
At the end of the auction, a winner is automatically appointed. The lot goes to the highest bidder, and amount is transferred to the fund in favor of which the auction was held.
Creating a charity auction
Authorized users can create a charity auction. They can:
- Describe the item and upload up to 5 photos of it.
- Select a charity to which the proceeds will be sent.
- Set an end date and time (the auction can last a couple of hours, or a few weeks or even months).
- Set the starting bid and (if desired) the redemption price of the lot, as well as the step, i.e. the minimum amount by which the bids in the auction will be raised.
- Customize the privacy of the auction: it can be available to everyone or only by link.
Bid and redemption form
For the bid and redemption of the lot, I adapted the interface of the form for donations and taking part in charity events on the project "Seizing the Moment". This way I managed to keep consistency and reuse the same component, extending its functionality.
