ATHABASCA — Musician, radio personality, auctioneer and … ventriloquist?
Danny Hooper is a man of many talents and now he can add another feather to his full cap with a puppet, one of 14 made by local puppeteers Hawkey Studios, during the Athabasca Rotary Celebrity Dinner and Auction. Hooper learned he was going to get one of the puppets and the 13 others will be auctioned off, by him at the Oct. 28 event at the Athabasca Regional Multiplex.
Without missing a beat Hooper laughed and said, “I’m sure I could do that. I keep surprising myself.”
Lucky 13, as it’s called, will have the puppets sold to the highest bidders and those 13 people go on stage, are given a card and as each of the 13 cards is drawn the holder sits down. The last person standing gets to choose from one of three larger live-auction items.
“I learned a long time ago to keep an audience engaged because as long as they're laughing, they stay engaged,” Hooper said. “When they're engaged, that's when they wrap their hearts around the cause and open the wallets up. The entertainment aspect of what I do is very, very important.”
And it’s his understanding of how to draw out top dollar from the crowd that has made Hooper the top fundraising auctioneer in Canada, if not North America, because it is a very different mindset and style from other auctioneers.
“A cattle auctioneer is concerned with how much money he can get for this pen of cattle, but a fundraising auctioneer thinks very differently,” he said. “We think, how much money is in this room and how can we capitalize on that and extract the maximum amount of value for (the charity). So, we've got lots of interesting things that we'll be doing.”
Hooper’s techniques, both found and self-developed, are so good he’s written the book EASY MONEY: How to Generate Record Profits at Your Next Fundraising Auction Event and he’s not afraid of other fundraising auctioneers or charities using them because at the end of the day it’s all about raising as much money as possible for good causes.
“'I’ve been doing this since 1987 and … I've done more Rotary clubs than any other single type of organization in all those years,” said Hooper. "The Rotarians are famous for being entrepreneurial. To this day, just about every Rotary auction I walk into I see a fresh new idea so, over the years, I just gathered the best of all the ideas I saw along the way, and I compiled them, and wrote the book Easy Money, but I'll bet 80 per cent of that content came from Rotary auctions.”
One of his techniques is his wildcard auction where guests can write down an item or service they want to donate, and Hooper will sell it right there.
“That wildcard auction actually is one of the coolest ideas that I ever came up with,” he said. “It was many years ago now (and) people used to come up to me at the end of auction events and say, ‘You know, Danny, I would have been happy to donate something to the auction tonight, but nobody asked me.’ So, after hearing this over and over I had an idea, and I got a stack of these neon-coloured index cards, like recipe cards, and I threw a couple down on a table on each table one night.”
That first time he raised over $45,000 more for the charity just off the wildcard donations, but it's hit and miss as there's no guarantee of anyone filling out a card.
“These were people that have vacation properties. Somebody donated a pig roast. I've had people donate pontoon boat rides around the lake. I've had people donate flights in their private aircraft," he said. “'I’ve had the babas donate homemade perogies and sides of beef donated by farmers and ranchers.”
Hooper is also MCing the celebrity side of the event which features two-time Olympic gold medallist and five-time World Champion curler Kevin Martin and the Hot Stove, a question-and-answer session with Martin and other celebrity curlers.
Tickets are on sale at showpass.com or calling Bonnie Nichols at 780-689-6113.
