The Winning Raffle by Hali Megan Gleason Lighthill
The Winning Raffle by Hali Megan Gleason-Lighthill
When in a fundraiser – there are several things you have to look at. What is something the people WANT enough to spend their money on? Are we promoting the goal of the charity clearly into the community? Are we announcing those who have donated to the cause?
My local church, last year, generated over $10,000.00 in a month long fundraiser. Tickets were raffled off for $5.00 a piece or you could pay $20.00 for five tickets. Anyone who bought the ticket, we would also get their contact information that was attached to the ticket. The final day of the raffle, we had a strange cover their eyes and pick one card out of bowl – we requested that the day of the drawing those who purchased a ticket to be there to claim the prize, some were not able to come, therefore retrieving their information from the ticket stub helped us to get in contact with them.
The grand prize for the raffle, was a Yeti Cooler. In the area we live in, Yeti coolers are very popular, therefore everyone wanted to get in on the action. The tickets sold VERY fast, we actually had to order more tickets because we ran through the tickets so quickly. Once we realized the amount of success we had with the Yeti cooler raffle. We tried it again a year later and this time we also added another prize to the collection. A handmade Barbeque Bowl as well as two smaller yeti coolers for 2nd, 3rd, and 4th place winners. Below Is an Attached picture of the bowl. We found that down in the south, what do people love more than something they can put their drinks in to keep cool – A Handmade Barbeque bowl, for those weekends for cookouts!
I believe the secret to fundraising is you have to get involved in the community. Especially in a small town that we live in – everyone knows, everyone. Therefore, you use that to your advantage. The second most important thing is raffling something that the people WANT! An example is the Yeti cooler where we live – if it was just any cooler people wouldn’t want it. They could spend the $20.00 on a cheap one at Walmart. We also were able to get the cooler DONATED through a local mom and pop store. They were nice enough to DONATE the cooler and later at tax time – they could write it off as charity work. Win – Win situation. We advertised that the Mom and Pop store that they were so nice to DONATE the cooler, that gave them FREE advertisement, we raffled the yeti coolers and BBQ bowl (that gave us ADVERTISMENT and OUTREACH into the community) and we were about to help a families in six different foreign missions. In this case it was a WIN-WIN-WIN! I believe the only issue that we came across was that the older people didn’t necessarily like to give their information out but we because most of them knew the person – they didn’t mind. We actually had some friends jump on board because it was such a good cause, that they were able to reach people we never thought of reaching.
Help Hali Megan Gleason-Lighthill's pursuit of a scholarship award by clicking the “sharing is caring” buttons – click on this link:
https://raffleticket.com/blog/the-winning-raffle/
Contributed by Hali Megan Gleason-Lighthill