Nashville Predators NHL Hockey Club Gala Fundraiser

Challenge:
The Nashville Predators Foundation is an organization within the Nashville Predators NHL Hockey Club that focuses on raising money to support Nashville and the surrounding communities. The Foundation approached Blink Marketing with a goal of securing a unique silent auction branded item for their annual hockey gala, one of their largest fundraisers of the year, that would appeal to a large range of people from hockey enthusiasts to CEOs to casual fans and the general public.

Approach:
Blink Marketing and the Nashville Predators Foundation project teams determined that if we could add the player signatures to the products going up for auction, the fundraising values would increase exponentially. With that, we narrowed our product brainstorming ideas to include high end products with large surface areas that could be used without destroying the signatures and would be kept as a keepsake item. Our teams decided that premium bottles of Chardonnay and Champagne with etched and color-filled team logo on the bottle and plenty of space for team signatures would be popular with the silent auction. The week of the event, we assisted the Predators Foundation in making a final ticket sales push by utilizing our social media capabilities and reaching out to our Blink community. We put images on Facebook and Twitter featuring the wine bottle along with ticket information for the event.

Outcome:
Prior to the event, the Director of Community Relations for the Predators Foundation said, “The bottles look fabulous!! Fans are going to eat them up (or maybe drink them up?)!” The winning bids for the branded wine and champagne bottles resulted in the Foundation raising more than $11,000 (over $10,000 going directly to support their local charity partners)! After the event, the Foundation reported that our unique branded item raised more than any other single item at the silent auction that night and immediately led to discussions for quantities to order for the next silent auction. The Predators Foundation also referred us to another NHL team, the Florida Panthers, for their own team fundraising auction.