The three-year story of a school auction that grew on the back of one development office, a parent community, and the most cause-forward landing pages on the platform.
In a ballroom dressed as a Monte Carlo casino this spring, 256 Villanova Preparatory parents settled in for dinner. The roulette table was real. The dealers were real. At each gaming station, a small QR code on a tent card let any guest who wanted more chips buy them on their phone, mid-conversation, without finding the cashier.
The silent auction kept running on hundreds of phones around the room. A pledge from a donor-advised fund posted to the development office’s system as its own line, so the business office knew exactly what was still outstanding. Behind the scenes, nobody was typing; gifts were already moving into Raiser’s Edge as they happened.
Three years earlier, the same gala had cleared $80,000 gross, less after expenses. The check-in line moved one paper form at a time. Sponsorship was a back-and-forth over email. There wasn’t really a landing page. There was an auction tab.
This is the story of what changed in between, told through three themed galas and the person who built the pages for each one.
A Gala That Couldn’t Stretch
Stella Day, Associate Director of Development, Villanova Preparatory School
When Stella Day took the Associate Director of Development role at Villanova Preparatory in 2022, she inherited a parent auction with the right ingredients and the wrong infrastructure. The Ojai school, just inland from Santa Barbara, runs on its parent community. The annual spring auction is the year’s biggest fundraiser, organized by parent volunteers and held as a dinner. The platform underneath it, by her own description, was “a small program,” inexpensive, but capped on what it could do.
Auction items lived inside the platform but almost everything else lived outside it. Bidding happened online; check-in happened on paper. Volunteers crossed names off printed lists at the door, then handed receipts to the database manager to be keyed in by hand once the room had cleared.
The 2023 gala grossed about $80,000, “which after expenses is a lot less than that,” she remembers. Sponsorships, ticket sales, and pledges all lived in somebody’s email thread, somebody’s spreadsheet, or somebody’s stack of paper. The cause itself had no real visual home, just a transactional auction list.
For a development office that already wore parent relations, alumni relations, and marketing as part of the same job, the bottleneck was less about money lost in the room and more about energy lost outside of it. Every cumbersome step was a step the team couldn’t spend on relationships, themes, or growth. The part that brought parents into the room in the first place, the cause, was getting buried under operational noise.
A Conference Floor Conversation
In October of 2023, she walked up to a Trellis booth at BBCon, the Blackbaud users conference. “Sister, what’s Trellis all about?” she remembers asking. Two answers caught her ear and held it.
The first was a QR code check-in, the kind of feature that compresses an hour of paper into ten minutes of phones. The second was the Raiser’s Edge integration, which would close the loop her team had been duct-taping together every spring. By the time she’d finished her questions, she had a tool that addressed the bottleneck and a December ticket-sale launch that gave her about a month to onboard.
She made the call. She also went back to her team and made the case for spending slightly over budget on a platform none of them had used before.
“I was able to persuade our team to spend a little bit more money over the budget and take a chance on this platform. And I was right. I was right.” — Stella Day, Associate Director of Development, Villanova Preparatory School
Onboarding took about a month. Three teammates built the first event together. Tickets opened on schedule in December.
The first themed gala under the new system. Three teammates built the entire event in about a month, between an October conversation at BBCon and a December ticket launch.
Building Boots and Bling
The first themed gala under the new system was Boots and Bling, a Western night in spring 2024. The team built the landing page from scratch, themed top to bottom, with rust tones and a cause statement at the head of the page.
What surprised them first wasn’t a feature; it was the absence of busywork. There was no minimum image size to fight. Photos went in by drag and drop. Cropping happened on the page itself, not in a separate tool with a save dialog and a folder hunt afterwards. Sponsorships, ticket tiers, and donation pages all lived on the same landing page, controlled from one menu, instead of scattered across tabs and emails to guests.
“Cropping it right there is magic.” — Stella Day, Associate Director of Development, Villanova Preparatory School
That sounds small until you remember she enters the auction items herself. For Monte Carlo Royale this spring, she keyed in 160 items across three weeks, duplicating each entry as a template for the next and modifying from there. Photos uploaded straight from the browser. The page rebuilt itself as items went up.
Boots and Bling grossed $96,000. Attendance still hovered around 100 that first year; the platform was new, the team was still learning, and the muscle was building. The number was a meaningful step up from $80K, and the start of a pattern.
The Boots and Bling giving block. A pre-checked donor-fees option saw roughly 80% of guests cover their own processing costs at checkout.
Three Themes, Three Years of Compounding
The pattern showed up in the next year’s numbers. Rewind 80s, in 2025, was the team’s neon answer to Boots and Bling, all chrome and synth. It brought in $138,000 with attendance over 200. Monte Carlo Royale, this spring, hit 256 guests and $170,000 gross. The 2026 number is more than double the 2023 baseline, and the third year in a row of meaningful growth.
Rewind 80s grossed $138,000. The team rotated the live auction’s six top items weekly on the landing page, so guests could browse for weeks before doors opened.
The lift came from places the new pages made visible.
Sponsorship tripled, because a parent or local business could click into a sponsor tier on the same landing page where they bought tickets, instead of waiting on a development team email back. About 80% of donors checked the box to cover their processing fees, once the option was simply pre-checked at checkout.
“Throughout the event, you’re always selling something. You’re always offering people opportunity to support the school.” — Stella Day, Associate Director of Development, Villanova Preparatory School
Pledges from donor-advised funds and check payments now had their own track in the system; a recent reconciliation flagged $10,000 in outstanding pledges that previously would have lived in somebody’s notes.
Live auction sales rose because guests could preview the six top items online for weeks before the gala, rotated weekly so the page kept rewarding return visits. Silent auction sales rose because the auction stayed open the day after the dinner, giving anyone who’d been across the room one more shot. Casino-table chip purchases ran on QR codes at the table, so nobody had to find the cashier.
The quieter shift happened inside the office. The business team stopped reconciling across three or four sources; the export had every tab they needed in a single download. The database manager mapped tickets and gifts to Raiser’s Edge once, and after that the integration carried it. The morning after the gala used to mean a week of rekeying. Now it means follow-up calls.
The Pages Themselves
The Villanova landing pages aren’t pretty in the way software demo pages are pretty. They’re pretty in the way a school yearbook is pretty. Each year’s gala gets its own visual identity: rust and denim for Boots and Bling, neon and chrome for Rewind 80s, roulette green and gold leaf for Monte Carlo Royale. The theme comes through on the page before it ever comes through in the room.
Monte Carlo Royale, 2026. The team added an impact report block this year, showing scholarship counts and the prior year’s total on the same page parents bought tickets.
Underneath the theme, the architecture is the same, and it puts the cause first. Real photos of real students sit next to the donation block. The cause is stated in the headline. An impact report this year shows how many students received scholarships and how much was raised the year before, all on the same page where a parent buys their ticket. There is no generic “would you like to add a tip?” text box; if a parent gives extra, the page tells them which kids it’s going to. Tickets, sponsorships, casino chips, pledges, items for sale, and “give what you can” all live on the same page, on the same side menu, never more than one click apart.
“I think this is one of our best websites that we’ve done. It’s very colorful, but it’s very easy to find anything.” — Stella Day, Associate Director of Development, Villanova Preparatory School
Across the schools using Trellis, the Villanova pages stand out for that reason. The cause is on the page, not behind a click. The theme is on the page, not buried in a header image. And every way a parent might want to give, from a $50 silent auction bid to a five-figure pledge from a donor-advised fund, is on the same page too.
Already Thinking About Next Year’s Theme
California rules don’t allow online raffles, so the team ran the casino tables on QR codes instead, and chip purchases never paused dinner service.
256 guests. $170,000 gross. A record-breaking year, and the third in a row of compounding growth.
The development office is smaller than the room would suggest, and the team is already debating what next spring will look like.
“It’s a platform that is worth looking into because it would really improve not just your sales or earnings, but it would help your development office work better and work less.” — Stella Day, Associate Director of Development, Villanova Preparatory School
If your gala has been running on paper and a small program for too long, the Trellis team is happy to walk through what one parent auction can become.
