What are chinese auctions, penny socials and penny sales, anyway?
They’re enduringly popular special event fund-raisers that combine the elements of both an auction and a raffle. What you call them and how you define them depends, in large part, on where you live. There are as many different ways to run these events as there are different names for them! The one thing most of the variations have in common, though, is that the bidding is done by ticket. Each participant buys a certain number of tickets for a set price, then uses those tickets to “bid” on a variety of donated items on “auction.” They can bid as many tickets as they wish on each item they’re interested in, usually by depositing the tickets in a container assigned to that item. Rather than going to the highest bidder, though, as it would at a regular auction, the item goes to the person whose ticket is drawn, at random, from the container. For more about this type of fun and profitable special event, click here to read the complete article.
