How to price tickets for your virtual online raffle fundraiser

One of the reasons we created the Online Raffle Ticket Generator was to create a system to allow for easy management of ticket packages.  In working with Non-Profits and Charities for many years, it became pretty obvious that success happens with your raffle when you can increase the average donation per sale as well as increase the audience participation.

In the traditional raffle world, tickets were printed up and distributed to the organization members for sale.  There was no way to easily manage multiple tiered ticket pricing.   But first, what is multi-tiered ticket pricing?

Multi-Tiered tickets pricing is where you offer something like the following:

$10 for 1 ticket

$25 for 3 tickets

$40 for 6 tickets

$75 for 15 tickets and so on.

One of the things that amaze me is when a charity argues why they should do that.  “But why should we give away tickets?”,  “If tickets are $10, then it should be $30 for 3 tickets”.   This is exactly why we wanted to write this article.  Unless you have some legal requirement or specific requirements to limit the number of tickets, the multi-tiered ticket package is probably the best way to offer tickets to your donors.

Before we offered this plugin, we built several sites for raffles and we closely watched how people interacted.  We also asked the customers for their previous info.   While the data is far from perfect, we took 113 raffles, and normalize their prices to a single $10 ticket.  So if their price was $5 per ticket – we simply adjusted all dollar values by 2x to come to the $10 mark.  If they had tickets at $20 we cut them in half.

Here is what we found out:

When a traditional raffle is selling tickets at $10 each with no incentive to purchase multiples tickets – then then average contribution is $11.18.   Basically only 1 in 10 purchase 2 tickets.  Or 1 in 50 make a $50 contribution.   So for all the hard work you do to bring people to your raffle, you are limiting your potential donation.  There was little variation based on the prize at this offering as well.  If you offered a car vs a TV, the results were pretty much average, fluctuating between $10.39 and $12.31.

But – when you offer ticket packages, which give an incentive of more chances for a larger donation, the average of the 113 raffles we tracked went to $64.53 per donation.  Now – with these results there was a much larger variation depending on the prize and the types of ticket pricing available.  For example, if the prize was a $1000 Smart Tv, the average donation was $31.83.  Yet when offering a Car with ticket options up to $500, then the average climbed to $80.95.  Regardless, the average result is a significantly larger contribution per customer.

The bottom line is you are leaving fundraising revenue on the table if you do not offer multi-tiered ticket packages and pricing for your online raffle.