Your Raffle Ticket Sales Will Surge by Following These Tips
Wouldn’t you love to experience a surge in raffle ticket sales for your organization’s fundraiser? Mateo Garcia offers up a whole heap of excellent tips and ideas in his “Impact a Life” scholarship essay. Thanks Mateo, excellent job – and good luck!
Nonprofit organizations, such as church groups, civic groups, youth sports organization, etc. can best derive benefit for their fundraising effort by holding a raffle fundraiser. Here are a few ways to maximize the sales of their raffle tickets:
First, you need to market your raffle tickets successfully. It is very important to advertise that you are holding a raffle fundraiser, and you must do this in strategic locations, anywhere you can. Your flyer should highlight the charity or project that will benefit from the funds. Also, it is important to create a buzz with the help of television, radio, and social media. People are more likely to buy raffle tickets if the monies will go toward a good cause, charity, or project such as the local community food bank to assist needy families, sports scholarships for low-income children, glasses and frames for the elderly, clothing bank at the church, toy drive for abused kids, etc.
In order to sell many tickets, your organization needs to be visible and sell those tickets at venues where many people are gathering. For example, Girl Scouts can always been seen sitting out in front of grocery stores, parks or other places selling their cookie boxes. With this kind of exposure, people expect to see this popular non-profit every March and April and come ready with their pocketbooks to buy cookies.
Perhaps your non-profit organization can hold a raffle every year so everyone can count on and look forward to this annual raffle. The bigger and more popular a raffle becomes, the more people want to participate, and this regular event can significantly help a non-profit organization’s bottom line. Secondly, everyone wants to buy raffle tickets for items that are in demand and popular, targeted for families, and/or save individuals money. The following prizes will encourage and stimulate ticket sales: movie tickets, restaurant gift certificates, hotel resort stays, local landmarks such as zoos or museums, etc. Many of these items can be donated by local establishments. It takes some planning, but someone should write a letter requesting a prize donation for the raffle with the promise to advertise or acknowledge that company’s generosity. It is great publicity for them, and most groups are happy to oblige.
Additionally, you may want to raffle off rare items such as a signed basketball from the local university basketball team. With these big ticket items, many people will buy more than one ticket. You could turn this and similar items into a 50/50 raffle. For example, the more raffle tickets a person buys for this prize, the more chances they earn to win 50% of all the money collected for these particular items. It’s a great incentive! The other 50% of the money would go toward the non-profit organization hosting the raffle itself. Everyone wins!
Finally, there are many ways to motivate your volunteers to sell more tickets. In general, it can be difficult for individuals to sell raffle tickets, especially if they don’t have access to other groups of people who are willing to buy raffle tickets, such as employees in a large department, schools, etc. Therefore, in order to motivate volunteers as a whole, why not motivate them as a team? For example, you can have a friendly competition between groups within the same organization or compete as a single team against another similar organization. When working as a team, more volunteers will work harder together in order to win or beat the other team.
Another idea is to give volunteers an opportunity to create their own themed raffle basket. For example, someone’s basket for “Movie Night†may contain: movie tickets, a box of popcorn, 2 liters of soda, candy, etc. Another person could put together a “Gardening†basket full of gardening goodies such as tools, seed packets, gloves, a watering can, etc. If you put all of these baskets on display, people can drop their raffle ticket into the basket of their choice. Then, a ticket is drawn for the winner of each of the baskets. Friendly competition can encourage and motivate volunteers to create great baskets and sell more tickets and raise a lot of money for your project.
Thus, a non-profit organization follows the above recommendations and suggestions for increasing raffle ticket sales, offering fantastic prizes to encourage and stimulate ticket sales, and motivating their volunteers to sell more tickets, they will derive the highest benefit and success from their raffle fundraising efforts.