Boost recurring donations this giving season with the upsell prompt!When an event is set to enroll its attendees as auction bidders and some or all of them are missing from the Bidders tab, it is almost always one of three causes. Work through them in order.
1. The attendees registered before you turned enrollment on
This is the most common cause by a wide margin.
A bidder is created as each registration is completed. The setting is not retroactive: anyone who registered before you switched it on stays an attendee only, however long the event runs afterwards.
How to tell: the attendees who are missing all registered earlier than the ones that worked.
What to do: add them from the auction's Bidders tab using From event attendee. Search each one by name, email, company, order number or ticket number. Their bidder record is created with a number, and their ticket details come across.
If your event is large, it is usually faster to add the missing attendees before doors open than to work through them at a registration desk.
2. The auction is not associated with the event
Auto-enrollment needs to know which auction to create bidders in, and that comes from the association between the two.
How to tell: open the event, look at the Auction Bidder section, and check the Auction field. If it says None, nothing will be enrolled. You can also check from the auction's Details tab.
What to do: set the association, then add any attendees who already registered as described above.
3. The attendees hold a ticket type that is not selected
If Auto-Enroll Attendees as Bidders is set to Selected ticket type(s), only attendees holding those ticket types become bidders. A guest on a sponsor table, a staff ticket, or a late-added ticket type will be skipped.
How to tell: the missing attendees share a ticket type, and that type is not among the selected ones.
What to do: either add the ticket type to the selection — which affects registrations completed from that point onward — or set enrollment to All attendees. Attendees who already registered still need adding manually.
Bidders were created, but they cannot check out
Enrolled bidders arrive with their name, email, phone and a bidder number, but without a Soapbox user account. A bidder needs a linked account, and a phone number, before a payment method can be saved against them.
If you intend to charge cards at checkout, link or create accounts for these bidders before the event rather than discovering it during settlement.
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