Raffles are an Efficient and Easy Way to Fundraise for Nonprofit Organizations by Jessica Washam
Raffles are an Efficient and Easy Way to Fundraise for Nonprofit Organizations by Jessica Washam
Raffles are an efficient and easy way to fundraise money for nonprofit organizations. They have the excitement of gambling, but they also have the benefit of raising a lot of money for a good cause. There are many ways to go about getting people to participate in the raffle, getting prizes for the raffle, and ways to motivate volunteers to sell more raffle tickets.
Raffles are always fun to participate in because you can get a high reward for a low price. That is what needs to be advertised when trying to get people to buy raffle tickets. This is a reason why so many participate in the Powerball, they can pay very little money in hopes of winning a great reward. The same can be said for raffle tickets. A person will be willing to spend one dollar or event ten dollars if the reward is greater than the upfront cost. To advertise this fun and exciting part of the raffle is sure to boost participants. Another tactic to get more participants is to clearly show who they will be supporting. If the raffle is for a little league soccer team, then show a cute picture of the little kids. If the raffle is for an animal shelter, then show cute pictures of the animals or even sad pictures of the animals. It is important to pull on the heartstrings of people in order to get them to participate in the raffle.
Prizes are one of the key ingredients to a successful raffle fundraiser. These prizes need to be spectacular to draw in more people. They need to be relatively new products that are desirable to the mass public and practical. A VCR or a CD player are not new products or that desirable to people these days, therefore people will not be interested in participating in the raffle. Good prizes would like big screen TVs, mini vacation packages, or gift certificates to nice restaurants. These are practical, new, and desirable prizes that people will want to win. The TV or mini vacation packages could be used as the grand prize for the raffle, and then gift certificates to restaurants could be the smaller prizes. The good thing about being a nonprofit organization is that a lot of times you can get the products at a discount price or even better you can get them donated.
None of what I have stated above would do any good if there are not volunteers to go out and get people to buy raffle tickets. There problem with this is that people are lazy, do not like to hassle people about buying things, and they have nothing to really motivate them. To help with this, the organization could create incentives to motivate volunteers to sell as many raffle tickets as possible. These can be small incentives like getting to leave work early one day or getting a free raffle ticket put into the drawing. Or they can be tailored to each organization, like if the raffle is for a kid’s basketball team, then the incentive could be a prize of tickets to a cheap basketball game in the surrounding area for the kid who sells the most raffles. If incentives do not work, then you might have to try the alternative. You might have to give the volunteers quotas and if they do not meet them then they will get a small punishment. No major punishment, maybe just like they have to wear an embarrassing hat at work for a whole week or they have to do a not so liked task at work for a whole week.
Nonprofit organizations already do great things, and raffle fundraisers are a great way to help. It is a good way to get a lot of money without spending too much on the prizes. In the end, most people will participate in raffles because they want to help the nonprofit organizations with their fundraising needs. But hopefully these tips will help strengthen the raffle fundraisers.
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Contributed by Jessica Washam
July 9, 2015