We have been helping charities with their online fundraising efforts for years. Having a successful raffle is easy and requires very little extra effort over having a poor raffle.
- The more the merrier! This may seem obvious, but the more people you can reach, the more likely you are to grow donations. The benefit of an online raffle is that you can share the link on social media. Let’s face it – it is hard to sell physical raffle tickets. First, you are limited in your audience and second, people just do not carry cash these days. You are no longer confined to your circle of influence, you are now able to share the raffle with the masses. Lets say you are a church doing a fundraiser for a new remodel. Traditionally, you are relying on the regular attendees to come and pickup paper printed raffle tickets and go out and sell. But with an online raffle, you can share this via email to all church members and they are able to promote it online. Most likely you have just doubled or tripled your reach.
- Capitalize on impulse donations
People rarely carry cash these days. If you doubt that – just watch the people use a debit card to get a soda from a machine or at the local fast food restaurant. With an online raffle, you can still have your traditional paper ticket raffle but also capture all those people who say they don’t have cash. You can now capture those donors on the spot by offering an online ticket purchase with Paypal or their Credit Card. - Increase your Average Donations
This is the true benefit behind our Raffle Ticket Generator. When we created this plugin, the goal was to increase the average donation size. The easiest way is to add perceived value by offering ticket packages. A recent customer went like this. They would hold a yearly raffle for a motorcycle. Their tickets were priced at $10 each. They did not have an incentive to increase the donation. So it was $10 for one or $20 for two. There was no way to monitor the ticket purchases in a traditional raffle. In the end, the average donation was just over $11 per donor. When they went to an online raffle. They used ticket packages.
1 ticket for $10.
3 tickets for $25
7 tickets for $50
12 tickets for $75
25 tickets for $100
75 tickets for $200
200 tickets for $300 There was a small benefit to increase the odds of winning for the smaller donations – but then they jumped it up at $100 and up. What do you think happened? Yep, the average donation went from $11 to over $64 per donor. It really didn’t cost the charity anything, but they were able to get almost a 6x increase. Coupled with the exposure and impulse donors they got, their campaign contributions came in about 10x previous. That is a huge increase. - Give the donors something for their donation
This comes in two parts. One is a tax deductible receipt, if their donation is tax deductible. When a charity is hosting a traditional raffle, those raffle tickets get lost in the shoe box of receipts. They rarely end up getting taken off their taxes because come April 15, no one can remember it. When you do an online raffle, they have an emailed receipt that they can file in their email folder for tax records.
The second thing is the ticket numbers. In reality, the ticket numbers are almost irrelevant. You have records of each entry in the order history. But in doing this for the last several years, we are amazed at how many of your donors will treasure that email with those ticket numbers. When they make a donation to your cause, they now have an email with the ticket numbers on it for their entry in the sweepstakes prize giveaway. - Re-marketing
With a traditional raffle, you have hand written info on a tiny piece of paper. Are you really going to sit and type in all the info into a database so you can encourage them to donate again next year? When you use the Raffle Ticket Generator, you can export all the donors into a marketing list. Now, even if they have moved away, you can send them info via email to contribute again in your next campaign.