Our story

We believe all of your events should be successful

That’s why we built an app that solves the biggest problems at fundraising events

Meet our team

We didn’t start out building software.

We started out
running a non-profit organization.

In 2010, we were hosting our annual fundraising event for the Prader-Willi Syndrome Association of Colorado (PWSACO), a non-profit organization we founded eight years prior. We had ample experience running and growing this event, in addition to an annual golf tournament for a related charity.

This year, we expected over 300 guests – significantly more than in past years. And we had over 150 items in our silent auction.

Our team got to work preparing bid sheets, creating labels, and setting up spreadsheets and mail merge programs. It was… exhausting.

At the end of the night, we watched in horror as guests spent over an hour waiting in the checkout line.

Later, we had to deal with numerous errors while processing bid sheets and invoices. We knew something needed to change.

So we built Handbid.

Meet

Jeff and Kari Porter

Right from the beginning, we understood the challenges of charity auctions

We’re Jeff and Kari Porter. We founded PWSACO after our daughter Abby was diagnosed with Prader-Willi Syndrome in 2002. As PWSACO’s signature fundraising event grew, it became clear that we needed to solve three different problems:

One

Long lines at check in, check out, and auction tables

Two

High likelihood of human data entry errors

Three

Guests’ frustration with sluggish auction administration

To address these issues, we drew from Jeff’s decades of experience as a media and technology executive and Kari’s experience as a software engineer to build a mobile bidding application. Handbid was born, and PWSACO never looked back.

Neither have over 5,000 of other Handbid clients

The way we see it, your cause is too important to settle for anything less than:

The best possible experience for event guests

Maximizing the number of ticket holders who become bidders

Consistently meeting or exceeding revenue expectations

Totally integrated registration and auction management tools

Fundraising tools that are easy for you to manage and fun for guests to use

Minimal waiting for checkin and checkout

You shouldn’t need multiple apps just to run your fundraising event

Handbid helps you run unforgettable fundraising events and raise more money doing it – all without having to juggle multiple software applications.

With Handbid, you’ve got one place to manage ticketing, registration, check in, auctions, donations, check out, and payments.

All of the data from your auctions and donations syncs automatically with registration and ticketing data, so you can keep up with donor activity before, during, and after an event.

We started outrunning a non-profit organization.