The Barnabas Network: A GiveSmart Success Story

"We now have many more people who know us through these auction fundraisers than knew of us at all before."

Derrick Sides

Executive Director, The Barnabas Network

Solutions

Key Features

Auctions

Raffles

Ticketing

$1 million+

raised through GiveSmart

8,000

registered bidders

1,500+

items per auction event

The Barnabas Network has operated out of Greensboro, North Carolina, for 20 years with a straightforward, urgent mission: collect furniture people no longer need and give it to families who desperately do, at no cost. Recycling furniture. Restoring lives.

What started as a modest operation now runs two locations, including one in High Point, the furniture capital of the world, where showroom samples from global manufacturers support The Barnabas Network mission.

Derrick Sides joined as Executive Director in 2017 and has spent nearly a decade expanding what the organization can do. For items that don’t fit the households they serve (outdoor furniture, oversized pieces, or premium goods better stewarded as revenue), the organization needed a way to sell them and reinvest the proceeds back in the mission.

For a long time, that meant tag sales.

Challenge & Solution

Tag sales worked until they didn’t. The model required a borrowed warehouse, a one-day window, and the hope that volunteers priced everything right. Tags got ripped. Bidders who lined up at 4 a.m. to be first in the door still walked away empty-handed when something they wanted had already moved. And with everything needing to clear in a single day, there was no time to recover from a slow start.

In 2017, Barnabas had developed a following of about 200 people for those tag sales. The organization’s total mailing list sat around 2,500.

When COVID shut down in-person events, and Barnabas simultaneously received a major donation from Wayfair (four tractor-trailer loads!), the model couldn’t hold.

Barnabas tried Facebook Live. They tried a Shopify storefront. Neither fit. What they needed was a platform built for high-volume, photo-intensive auction sales where volunteers could walk a 50,000-square-foot warehouse and upload five to 10 photos per item, straight from their phones.

They found GiveSmart.

Results

From Tag Sales to Online Auctions

The first online auction solved every problem tag sales created. Free-market bidding replaced subjective pricing. Competitive interest drove items higher than volunteers would have tagged them. Everything moved—not because the clock was running out, but because buyers had time, information, and skin in the game.

“We were surprised that some things went so high,” Derrick said. “We were surprised some things went so low. But at the end of the day, we raised a lot more money.”

A Broader Reach Than They’d Ever Had

When Derrick joined, the organization’s entire mailing list was about 2,500 people. Today, Barnabas has 8,000 registered bidders, all of whom found the organization through the auctions.

That reach compounds. Supporters share auction listings on social media. People looking for a deal on a leather sofa discover an organization doing meaningful work. Those conversations lead to volunteers, donors, corporate sponsors, and church partnerships. The Wayfair relationship itself grew out of a connection that started through one of Barnabas’s partner agencies.

“Having this platform and being able to reach more people than we could with flyers and yard signs for our warehouse sales … it’s been a game changer for us,” Derrick said.

Their current auction event, staged in a donated 50,000-square-foot warehouse, features about 1,500 pieces and aims to raise close to $200,000.

Looking Ahead

Barnabas is celebrating its 20th anniversary this fall with a dinner event, their first formal gala in years. They’re exploring text-to-give campaigns to engage the thousands of registered bidders who won’t attend in person, as well as a 50-50 raffle tied to the anniversary or a golden ticket raffle featuring a high-end furniture piece.

The organization is also in conversations about moving to GiveSmart’s Donor CRM, which would connect auction data, event history, and giving records without manual reconciliation across systems. “Rather than having another silo that we have to put information in,” Derrick said, “it just keeps it nice and tidy to have it all in there.” The goal is every dollar tracked in one place, whether it comes in through an auction, a check, or a text-to-give campaign. “It doesn’t make sense for us to enter that information into another platform when all we really need to do is track any dollars they give to us.”

Beyond the anniversary, Barnabas has recently secured funding for a permanent warehouse location, eliminating the twice-yearly scramble for borrowed space that has defined their model for years. A permanent home means year-round collection, more consistent volunteer engagement, and a real path toward converting bidders into long-term supporters.