Raffle-Tickets.us Blog

When is a raffle a bad idea? When it makes you look desperate. Take the case of the Bank of Queensland, which is launching a raffle next month offering account holders a chance to win $20,000 in hopes of luring more people to the bank. As the article notes, this cannot be a good sign for the Australian bank. It suggests desperation, indicating that they can no longer rely on competitive interest rates to attract people. A bank should not in any way resemble a casino.

Raffles are a great way to raise money for a good cause and to provide a bit of fun for members of an organization. But if you’re a reputable financial institution, it’s perhaps not the best way to instill confidence in the public. Make sure that you’re not throwing a raffle as a last ditch effort to save a sinking ship if the ship’s a business. Of course, raffle fundraising for a non-profit can be a good way to garner support for a cause that has not been getting a lot of attention.

Yes, the Halloween season is upon us.  This is great season for doing creative things with raffles.  I think because Halloween is one of my favorite holidays, I get really creative with my raffling ideas.  This year I ventured into my local mall to see which business, or if the mall as a whole, would be interested in a raffle idea to help their business.  As almost all my clients are at first, they we’re hesitant to invest in anything that they were going to have to spend money on.  Thank you bad economy.  But after I had the opportunity to explain the idea fully, and how it would actually benefit their businesses, they actually liked the idea and were interested in pursuing it.   I actually had a lot of really good responses to the following idea:

Most malls hold a trick or treat event throughout the mall either on Halloween, or a couple days before it.  Kids and their parents can trick or treat at all the different stores of the mall, and the stores usually offer some sort of sale during that time.  On that night, my idea was for each store to sell a raffle ticket specifically from their store at their check out desk, so that they customers would be drawn into the store.  This increases the possibility of them actually buying something from the store.  Of course there would be signs and employees at the front of the store letting customers know about the raffle tickets.  Each store that the customer visits and buys a raffle ticket from (limit 2 tickets per customer per store), they enter their name into a big drawing for a gift certificate (amount tbd) to the mall.  Also, the store that sells the most amount of raffle tickets would get to keep a certain high percentage of the profit made from the raffle tickets.  This would motivate the employees to actually sell them.

There are obviously some legal issues that have to be sorted out with this idea, but for the most part the powers that be at the mall are excited and intrigued by this idea.  They like the idea of rewarding both the customer and the stores that rent space from them.  It gives a new purpose to a holiday that wouldn’t normally bring in a lot of money for them.  I really hope they choose to do this because I honestly think it would help them earn some money in a non-traditional way.

I recently went a visited some of the local restaurants in my area.  Not really like fast food restaurants, but more places that are sit down restaurants.  I was actually pretty successful in striking up deals with them where they would use raffle tickets in their restaurant.  The following is the pitch I gave them as to how they could use their raffle tickets:

Every time a costumer comes in and buys drinks/food they can opt to put their name in the raffle for a $100 gift card to that specific restaurant.  They can fill out a raffle ticket for every item of food or drink that they order during that visit.  Then, at the end of the month the restaurant will draw a name out of the raffle and give or send the gift card to whoever wins.

Not only does this give the restaurant an opportunity to stand out from other restaurants, it will also help improve their sales.  If people know that their restaurant is providing this, they are much more likely to eat there than some where else.  I thought that this was a pretty creative idea, and a lot of the restaurant managers liked the idea.