Trick or Treat or Raffle
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.