Raffle-Tickets.us Blog

Oh, in my posts on raffle twists, how could I have forgotten the time-honored cow chip raffle? Running across this article this weekend reminded me of this unique way of picking raffle winners. The middle school I attended used to hold one of these yearly. Basically, the raffle organization paints a grid on a big field, numbering each space in the grid and selling tickets with corresponding numbers. Then you simply let some well-fed cows loose on the field, and voila! They choose your raffle winners for you by their own natural processes.

This is just another example of how creative you can get with your process for choosing raffle winners. Come up with some innovative way of picking a winner, tying the method to the organization you’re raising funds for. If you’re an agricultural or animal rights organization, the cow chip raffle’s a great choice.

Over the years, people have come up with many creative twists on the traditional raffle. Using one of these variations can provide novelty for participants and hosts alike. After all, a traditional raffle is old hat to just about everybody on the planet. Here are a few of the variations that I’ve run across and that you might consider.

• 50-50 Raffle: This one’s nothing more than the split-the-pot raffle often run at high school sporting events. Participants buy raffle tickets and all of the money collected is added together. The holder of the winning raffle ticket splits that money with the organization running the raffle.
• Door Prize Raffle: I call this one a door prize raffle because every single participant who doesn’t “win” gets a sort of door prize gift anyway. Bags or other containers are filled, each with either a door prize (one suggestion is to use candy) or a number inside. They are all wrapped alike, and the contents are muffled with tissue paper or other material to disguise them. Participants purchase the containers, and at a given time they are all opened together. Those who have chosen numbers choose from the prizes in the order indicated by their numbers (1, 2, 3, 4…).
• Reverse Raffle 1: There are a few types of raffle that are sometimes called reverse raffles. The first variation involves first choosing a prize that no one will want–a donkey, an hour of watching grass grow, having to stand on stage and wear a leotard while singing a song–whatever. Then everyone that comes to the event or is involved in the organization is given a raffle ticket, free. The only way to get out of the raffle is to sell your raffle ticket back to the host organization.
• Reverse Raffle 2: Another common variation on the reverse raffle involves a real prize–one that people will actually want. The twist is that instead of giving the prize to the first number drawn, you give it to the last ticket remaining. To add to the drama, when you get down to the last few remaining candidates, you can give them the choice of splitting the prize between them or continuing to draw numbers.

The political raffle I wrote about back in August got me thinking about other ways for people to earn raffle tickets rather than buying them. No one ever said that a raffle ticket needs to be given in exchange for cash. For that political raffle, people earned raffle tickets by handing in names of prospective voters. What other types of effort or information might be worth offering raffle tickets for?

It occurred to me that sometimes more than money, non-profits and other organizations need man-hours. For example, do you have a community garden project that you’re trying to get going, but just don’t have enough people working on it to get underway? Offer raffle tickets in exchange for a certain amount of work. The prize could be garden tools, produce from the garden, seeds, or something completely unrelated. Or does your company need market research information? Offer raffle tickets to people who fill out surveys for you.

Just read this article about a couple who won a round of fertility treatments through a raffle. Not only that, but they conceived and now have a beautiful baby boy. Can you imagine the story they’ll have to tell that kid of his birth? Or better yet, how he as a small child will translate that story to friends? “Yeah, my mommy and daddy actually won me in a raffle.”

Raffling medical treatments strikes me a little funny. Just imagine the concept in another situation. A charity raffles off the money to pay for chemo treatments. Seems a bit cruel, doesn’t it? Great for the person who wins, but raffles have a lot of losers…. Of course, I don’t think raffling IVF treatments is likely to prove a forerunner to anything like that. But it does make me think about the fact that when choosing creative raffle prizes, one must always consider the implications.

Well, not strictly speaking. As far as I’m aware, the President will be staying snugly ensconced in his current domicile. But the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) are raffling off a chance to meet President Barack Obama. I’d say this one-ups the calf-roping lesson with the lieutenant governor I wrote about last month. Also included in the prize ticket is the opportunity to watch a taping of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. All you have to do is donate to the campaign before midnight tonight.

By this maneuver, the campaign gets not only your money, but also your contact information. I’d be curious to see how this tactic works for the DSCC. Will they get more small donors than usual? I can hardly think this raffle would tempt anyone into a large donation they did not otherwise intend to make. But again it does help them get contact info. A perfect time for another reminder that it’s always important to know your goals when throwing a raffle. It can be much more than a fundraiser. It’s a great three-in-one device for getting money, phone numbers and raising awareness for a cause. Keep that in mind when designing both your raffle tickets and your publicity campaign.

When planning your raffle, don’t be afraid to get creative with the prizes. Many small organizations limit themselves to the small prizes that everyone expects–gift certificates, gourmet baskets, electronics, power tools and other such items. However, the more creatively you can think for your prizes, the more interest, hype and money your raffle will draw. Selecting the prizes for your raffle is a great opportunity to think outside the box. Ask yourself a series of questions as you think up your raffle prizes: What unique services do people involved have to offer? What kind of interesting packages could we put together? Who do I know that might be willing to make a donation of time? What kind of open-ended prizes could we offer?

Such questions will lead your thinking away from more traditional, tangible prizes that ticket buyers could simply purchase for themselves. If you’re having trouble getting started with this type of creative thinking, run a Google search to see what types of prizes other organizations have offered. If you do a news search, you’ll come across some of the more intriguing ideas that have come up recently. While many of the prizes that make the news may be too expensive for your organization to offer, think about how you might scale them down. For instance, I just saw a news article talking about a raffle that’s offering an all-expense-paid trip to Oktoberfest in Munich. This is a grand prize indeed, but a smaller organization could offer something more local. How about a trip to a nearby state park, with transportation, meals and a guided tour included?

In the end, any kind of value-added prize will prove much more of a draw than something you’ve simply bought at the store. The more unique a raffle prize is, the more attractive it will be. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Guided tours
• All-expenses-paid outings
• Service-oriented prizes (a day of housecleaning or landscaping)
• Customizable prizes (the opportunity to commission artwork or a gift certificate to the restaurant of the winner’s choosing)
• Unique opportunities (a day with a local celebrity or the chance to fly a plane)

When planning a raffle intended to be a significant fundraiser, it’s very important to advertise it properly. This is one aspect of running a raffle that many organizers forget or neglect. But if you don’t advertise well, you won’t enjoy the highest level of success. Think about it–if nobody knows about your raffle, how can they buy tickets? Many organizations don’t go beyond word-of-mouth advertising to promote their raffle. This is a great way to get the word out, but you really need to explore some more avenues to earn the most money for your enterprise.

Of course, the methods you use to advertise your raffle will depend on the cause you’re raising money for. For instance, if you’re running a school raffle you’ll probably focus on local channels, whereas for a national non-profit organization, you’d want to use channels that had a much wider audience. So start by thinking of that audience. Who are they, and how do they get their news? Where do they shop? What websites are they likely to visit? By asking yourself these questions, you can get a fairly good idea of where you ought to advertise. Some ideas include:

• School and community message boards
• Grocery stores and other local retailers
• Local radio stations
• Local television channels
• Newspapers, local or national
• Your website
• Enthusiast websites (e.g. environmental websites if you’re an environmental NPO)
• Flyers and bumper stickers
• Email lists

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of news articles about organizations raffling off homes–everything from Brazilian castles to typical suburban single family homes. Now, in the case of a raffle being run by a huge organization or wealthy personality, I have no problem imagining where they got the funds to do such a thing. But I’ve seen a ton of references popping up to smaller non-profits raffling off houses. This peaked my interest, so I started to look into it.

Apparently, in some states individual home owners can work with non-profit organizations to raffle off their houses. The idea is that, if you can’t sell your house on the regular market (presumably because your buyers can’t get mortgages and not because the house is a disaster), rather than selling it off for way less than market value and not being able to pay off your own mortgage you can sell raffle tickets so that both you and the NPO get a good deal.

If you’re interested, you’ll have to look up the laws in your own state. But in general the way it works is that you draw up an agreement with an NPO under which they agree to buy your home from you at appraised value once they have sold a predetermined number of raffle tickets. If they don’t sell enough tickets, the house stays in your hands. But if they do, they buy the house and get to keep an raffle proceeds that exceed that price to fund their organization.

It sounds like a pretty sweet deal, if you can pull it off. Especially in this real estate market. Do you know anyone who’s done it successfully?

Before you go ahead and start planning your raffle, make sure to look into your state’s gambling laws. I just read an article about a Utah community that was planning to raise money for a new police dog by selling raffle tickets. Unfortunately, they failed to take into account that the state’s strict gambling laws forbade raffles. Now, these folks had the best of intentions. Their county needed a new drug-sniffing dog and this seemed like a harmless way to raise the necessary funds. But the law is the law.

So do a little research before you launch your raffle. In many states, raffles for charities are legally allowed, considered on the same level as state lotteries. In other places, like Utah apparently, they’re a no-go no matter what the cause. The relevant laws are legislated by the state. Simply Google your state and raffle laws. The information is often on the website of the state attorney general, though in some states, like Kentucky, a separate government department may exist to handle charitable gaming laws.

Here’s a new one to me. I just read a news article out of Austin Texas about a political candidate who’s trying to use a raffle to glean information about likely Republican voters. The campaign is offering raffle tickets to supporters who submit contact information for voters who might support the campaign. The idea is an innovative one.

Of course, it’s not far off from all of those raffles for cars you see in malls that are run for the sole purpose of getting consumer contact information. An interesting twist is that the campaign is tailoring the prizes to their constituency, hoping to narrow down the type of information that is submitted and weed out random submissions in that way. The prizes include meals with prominent Republicans, a lesson in marksmanship and a calf-roping lesson with a lieutenant-governor.

This could be turned into a good strategy for many organizations hoping to raise money through a raffle. Take a lead from this campaign and customize your prizes to your audience. Say you’re environmental group trying to get the word out about buying locally. Offer prizes like a membership to a CSA, a personal tour of a local farm or a year’s supply of locally-raised, grass fed beef. Not only could you sell more tickets to those who are already interested in your cause, prize winners who are not as familiar with locally grown food will get a first hand experience.