Whether you’re holding the draw at a school dance, a reception, or a fundraising carnival, you can increase attendance with a celebrity appearance. Perhaps someone on your staff knows a true celebrity who can be persuaded to show up, but if not, consider that you do know someone whose presence will encourage others to attend: this might be a local sportscaster, a popular teacher, or even a popular older student.

Advertise the big event with posters and flyers. Print out invitation and event tickets to help your students and their friends feel special. Spread the word in any way you can. Use your social networks, website, and any other online forum where you can advertise the event.

Whatever the event, be sure to have students circulating with the remaining raffle tickets so you can keep selling right up to the last minute. Then, make a production of it! Use a microphone and an emcee. Gather a crowd. Find a drummer and get a drum roll. Draw out the moment: announce the number of tickets sold, the amount of money raised, and explain how this money will help your school. Then, have your celebrity draw the lucky winners and announce them. While the crowd cheers and the winners mount the stage, you can relax, knowing you’ve held a successful school fundraiser.

Related posts:

1. The Long Draw: Your School Raffle Part II
2. The Long Draw: Your School Raffle Part I
3. Finer Points

Some things to keep in mind: how will you track sales? You need to decide in advance, but you should keep a record not only of how many tickets you’ve sold, but the names and contact information of everyone who purchases one.

While your students can certainly ask their friends, families, and neighbors to buy tickets, for maximum impact, you’ll want to use every tool in your arsenal. Other schools have had success with some smart ideas.

Consider finding a business or a festival that will allow you to set up a little table where your students can sell to passersby. If they have uniforms or costumes, they should wear them: the more adorable they look, the more tickets they will sell. Displaying the prizes prominently helps fuel sales. If this is not possible, at least have photographs of the prizes available.

Prepare your students by coaching them. You don’t want them to sound as if they’re reading off of cue cards, but they should be able to explain to potential customers where their money will be going. Let the students know why raffle ticket sales are important to their education. If they understand the meaning of the raffle, they can tell ticket buyers how their contribution will enrich the lives of children.

Next week: The Big Draw

Related posts:

1. The Long Draw: Your School Raffle Part I
2. School Raffles

Long-term prize draws for nonprofit organisations such as your school can be fun, but they require a lot of hard work. Start planning in advance and make a success of the occasion. Choosing the appropriate prizes, proper sales strategies, and turning the final draw into an exciting event can all translate into success.

First, know your supporters. To whom will you be selling raffle tickets, and for what prize are they most likely to open their wallets? Ask around, or use an Internet quiz feature like Facebook Questions to get the best intelligence. Your draw will be a bigger success if people are excited about your prizes.

Next, prepare your sales force. Consider a separate prize draw for students who sell the most tickets, or else offer them their own tickets for a student raffle based on the number of tickets they sell. Get them excited to start selling, and teach them the fundamentals of sales. Be sure to teach them how to be safe as well as how to be polite and be good salespeople.

Then, set a date for the big draw. If you can incorporate it into a larger event such as a carnival, performances, or dance, you can increase interest and continue selling raffle tickets right up to the moment of the prize draw.

Once you know what prizes will be offered, how much they will sell for, and when the draw will take place, it’s time to print those raffle tickets. Choose an appropriate design online, fill out the ticket template, and print those tickets. They’ll be shipped to you so you can get your kids to start selling.

Next week: The big sales drive

Related posts:

1. The Right Foot
2. School Raffles
3. Eyes on the Prize

Games of chance fall under Gambling Act 2005: in most cases, your fundraiser will require a licence and some degree of government supervision if you intend to sell raffle tickets and hold a prize draw for a large, multi-day raffle open to the general public. One way to circumvent this oversight is to transform the game of chance into a trivia contest.

To do so, rather than simply selling the ticket, you are selling an opportunity to answer a trivia question, which may lead to a prize. In general, this is done by selecting a question that most of your contestants should be able to answer. For the most part, asking this question eliminates the need for a licence, and in general, there should be no problems.

However, there have been cases wherein organisations with higher profiles have been held under suspicion for asking questions that were too easy: common knowledge versus trivia. According to the law, the question must be complex enough to “deter a significant proportion of potential participants, or to eliminate a significant proportion of entrants.”

Don’t court trouble! Protect yourself by choosing a question that is not dumbed down. For instance, “Name the Prime Minister,” might be considered a no-brainer. Depending on your supporters, you might instead ask donors to solve a math problem, or answer a question that would only be common knowledge only within your group.

Naturally, there will be a number of correct answers. All these raffle tickets go into the hat, and from there, you may hold your fully legal prize draw!

Related posts:

1. Letter of the Law
2. A Proper Number of Prize Draws
3. Caveat

Selling Raffle Tickets to support your local school is perhaps the simplest way to help earn more money for education. You need not organise food, drink, and entertainment, as you must for some charitable events, and no one need sort and delivery boxes of biscuits, candies, or other popular fundraising sales items. I might point out that such fundraisers also mean that a large percentage of your money goes to the organisation that sells the biscuits and candies to your school, whereas all prize draw profits stay at the academic institution.

The key to successful school prize draws is to motivate the salespeople: that is to say, your children. Small children may not be able to visualize the outcome of a successful draw. Perhaps they don’t understand why you need the money, or the long-term benefits they will receive. But they can certainly visualize winning a prize on their own.

You may choose to offer a large prize to the top salesperson, but an even better way to motivate them is to instead set up a second raffle for the kids, but they cannot buy tickets to this draw. Instead, they must earn those tickets. For instance, for every ten pounds of money they raise, they earn one ticket for a prize draw to win something they really want: such as an iPod or a new bicycle. Take a survey and determine what prize will best motivate them, and then watch them start selling!

Here’s a new tip for earning more money: the “fill in service.” If supporters buy a large amount of tickets, your students can fill in their names and contact information on the tickets for them. Make it a number worth your time: say, twenty-five pounds. You’ll be surprise how many people will buy more tickets to earn this free service!

Related posts:

1. School Raffles
2. A Proper Number of Prize Draws
3. Need Help?

Finding the prizes is your first step. Since you must identify the three largest prizes in your draw directly on the raffle ticket, it’s best to take care of this issue prior to considering the other details. What can you offer? The more attractive the prize, the more raffle tickets you can sell.

You must also identify the time and place of the actual prize draw. Don’t have this information? Figure it out immediately! If you do not already have a venue in mind, perhaps you can make a deal with someone who does have a space (such as a the owner of your local pub) and would appreciate the extra business your crown might draw. Choose a time and place.

How about prices? Typically, you’ll want to sell your raffle tickets for one or two pounds. Work out the sums: how many tickets will you need to sell at various prices to reach your sales goal.

Finally, if your raffle is to require a licence, go get it! This information must be printed on the body of the ticket, so you’ll need the licence number prior to ticket printing.

Review the information. If you’ve filled in all the blanks and it all makes sense, then you’re ready to print your own raffle tickets online and start selling!

Related posts:

1. Spread the Word
2. Back to the Basics

“Buy a raffle ticket?” the bigger one said, waving a single ticket in my face.

“Um…” I replied.

“What’s it for?” my friend asked.

“For our school.”

But what would that ticket do for his school? The little chap couldn’t say. He didn’t know anything about the cause for which he was raising money. All he knew was the name of his school, but he couldn’t say whether they needed to raise funds for a new gym floor, to send the band to a competition or (as is the case with some schools) to purchase base essentials like paper and pencils!

“You can win $500!” the kid continued. “And the ticket is only $1!”

“But how many tickets do you think you’ll sell?” I asked. “How many did they print?”

The child didn’t know. And while $500 is a fair sum, the odds of winning depend only the number of tickets sold. For a cash raffle with a prize of $500, they would need to print at least 1000 raffle tickets and sell them all to make an appreciable profit. A “50-50″ cash raffle is the standard, although, by selling enough tickets, one could offer a large prize and still keep an even larger profit. In the case of a $500 50-50 cash raffle, that $1 ticket has a 1 in 1000 chance of winning.

But I couldn’t calculate the odds. I simply wasn’t given enough information to be moved by the child’s pitch, and these boys were old enough that there were no adults kept handily about to answer my questions. (Meaning, of course, that they were old enough that I wasn’t moved by the cuteness factor of their pitch, either.)

This underscores the need to prepare your sales team, whether they are seasoned professionals or 10 years old. Make a list of all the questions someone might conceivably ask about your raffle before you start selling booklets, and coach your crew to memorize the answers.

Needless to say, those kids didn’t sell me a raffle ticket that day.

No related posts.

Coming soon, UK Ticket Printing will devote this space to sharing the stories of our customer’s successes (and failures!) for all to learn from. We’ll profile the best and worst prize draws you’ve ever seen, learn what to print on a raffle ticket, and see top fundraisers in action.

Have you a story you’d like to share? We’ll be contacting potential customers for future features, but if you have something to say right now, why not let us know through this blog? We’ll write an article about your group and your raffle, sharing links to your websites and pages for your upcoming activities, plus pictures of your event, your prizes, or your logo. There may even be some extra incentives for your future draws involved.

Keep checking this space for more top idea and the freshest thoughts on local and regional trends to make your upcoming activities more profitable than ever!

Related posts:

1. When you’re not ready
2. Who Buys Raffle Ticket?
3. Your Green Raffle

Printing colorful, vernal Raffle Tickets for your next fundraiser is the perfect way to welcome Persephone back from the Underworld while increasing your funds! Spread the joy of spring with the lush images of new life. Pictured above, one of UK Ticket Printing’s Nature Series, the Green Leaves Raffle Ticket, along with one of two Spring Fling designs. Both work wonders in providing some much-needed light after a gloomy season.

Consider giving your prize draw a festive name that summons the idea of new life and new possibility. Ensure your sales team maintains a sunny outlook as they go about selling tickets. Be sure to remind potential supporters that the weather is about to turn, the season will change, and that now is the time to support new ventures and nurture fresh shoots.

Your spring renewal starts with luscious, green Raffle Ticket designs, a splendid way to capitalize on the human heart’s hope for the new dawn of a new day.

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1. Spring is Here!
2. Oh, Christmas!

If you’ve found success with a one or two day prize draw or raffle conducted within the auspices of your event (considered a “small lottery” under the law), it might seen logical to take it to the next step. Why not increase your profit by increasing the size of your prizes?

The answer to that is, of course, that this may be illegal. The law restricts small lotteries to prizes of with a value of 250 GBP or less, and forbids the awarding of a cash prize in such situations. You may already be aware of some of the other laws pertaining to small lotteries, lucky dips, tombolas, and sweepstakes. For instance, you may only sell these raffle tickets during the event, and you must choose the winner during the course of the event.

Cash Raffles may be arranged, but they require special licence and oversight. If you wish to maintain your fundraiser as a small lottery, you must avoid cash prizes. Otherwise, you must register with the Gaming Council and be subject to other rules and oversight.

If you’d like to learn more about using a prize draw or raffle as a fundraiser, you can ring the Institute of Fundraising on 020 7840 1000.

Related posts:

1. School Raffles
2. Letter of the Law