Any group member can add, own, edit, or delete his or her own contacts as well as reassign ownership to other members. In addition, auction administrators have the ability to edit or delete/archive contacts in a group. Conveniently, contact owners and administrators can communicate with contacts via email or text message directly from the contact record.

Contact owners and administrators can delete contacts from their group by clicking the trash can icon on the Contact Search Results page. As a means of preserving the event history, Silent Auction Pro™ does not permit contacts who have attended an event or donated to an event in the past to be deleted from their group.

Before adding a new contact, search the contacts database for that name to avoid duplicating records.

After a contact is in the database, the owner or an auction administrator can add a donation from that contact at any time by using the Donors & Donated Items > Enter Donated Items menu option. Group members cannot enter donations for contacts that they do not own.

To send email or text messages to a contact already added to the database

1. Click the Contacts menu item and choose Add/Search for Contacts or Show All Contacts to locate the contact you seek.
2. Verify that the contact's email or cell phone information is on record.
3. Click either the email (envelope) or text message (sms) icons to bring up the appropriate form from which you can type a message. Recipients of a text message will not be able to reply to the message. Messages sent through Silent Auction Pro are outgoing only.
4. After completing the form, click the Send Email or Send Text button at the bottom of the form. For bulk communication options, see Writing Letters, Emails, Texts, and Custom Reports.



Text messages can only be received IF the bidder's cell phone number is saved in the Contact record AND they have not selected to Opt Out of text messages originating from Silent Auction Pro™.

For more information on text message Opt Out options, see our help page on text notifications.

Manage your contact's tickets, bidder number, card authorization and checked in status

Use the contact record's Event section to buy tickets (or assign a ticket purchased by a differnt guest to THIS guest) and update bidder and checked in status. Guests are automatically marked as bidders (and receive a bidder number) if a ticket has been assigned to them, or they purchased their own ticket, or if they registered for the event by puttign a card on file. You can manually adjust the bidder status by clicking the Yes | No radio buttons.

1. Click the Purchase Tickets button to purchase tickets.
2. Select the appropriate tickets for the purchaser and then click the Pay Now or Pay Later button to record the ticket purchase. The guest can pay by Credit Card (which will be stored for later use during express check out), check, or cash. If the ticket has $0 value (i.e. a comp ticket) select the Pay Later option. Since the ticket has no value, you will not be able to process a $0 invoice. Instead, select Pay Later, return to the guests contact record, and then authorize their card by clicking on the Authorize Credit Card button at the bottom of the contact form; allowing you to store their card and charge it later during the check-out process.

1. Click the Use Existing Ticket button. This will open a dialog in the middle of the screen from which you may select people who have existing tickets that are unused
2. Select the person who bought the ticket
3. Select the ticket or tickets to assign to the new person by checking the appropriate checkbox.
4. If items are included with the ticket, make those choices as well
5. Click the Use Ticket(s) button to record the ticket assignment
6. Make sure the Bidder radio button is set to Yes
7. Click the Update Contact or Authorize Credit Card button to save the record and proceed to the next step

Contact ownership

To help prevent multiple group members from soliciting donations from the same contact, Silent Auction Pro allows you to assign contacts to group members. Auction administrators can change the ownership contacts on a one-by-one basis. Group administrators can reassign all contacts owned by one member to another member.

Group administrators can easily reassign ownership of all contacts from one member to another member. This is useful when volunteers come and go in an organization and there are hundreds of contact records to manage. The reassign contacts icon is only visible to group administrators. However, auction administrators can change the ownership of contacts on an individual basis by updating the Contact Owner field on the Edit Contact page.

1. Click on the Group > Show All Contacts menu option
2. Scroll to a contact that you want to remove as the owner
3. Click on the icon to show the Reassign Contact Owner dialog
4. Select the member you want to assign as the new owner
5. Check the Update all contacts owned by checkbox and click the Update Owner button to reassign all contacts owned by this member to a different member. You may need to refresh the page to see the new contact owners.