Planning your raffle campaign

Vega offers the functionality to run and process a raffle but we're also here to help and advise on what kind of raffle is best for your organisation, and how to generate the most income for your cause.

You first need to think about the below questions:

What size raffle campaign are you aiming for?

What prizes are you able to get?

What will the income of your raffle go towards?

What ticket offers and bundles will enable you to sell the most tickets?

How can you best promote your raffle?

Raffle size

It is important to set accurate targets when it comes to estimating potential income from your raffle campaign. Some good metrics to use are the number of active contacts in your database multiplied by 2 or your best campaign income multiplied by 4-6. Divide this target income by 20 to get a good estimation of the number of tickets you're likely to sell, based on a single ticket costing $20. You should also factor in the potential for up to 10% extra on this income from donations, although this does not need to be considered when it comes to your licensing turnover amount.

Raffle prizes

Sourcing your raffle prizes should be the first step in your planning and great prizes make for easy promotion.

Prizes in a New Zealand class 3 licenced raffle must be worth at least 20% of the gross potential income, this is the number of tickets available times the cost of a single ticket.

Once you have started your raffle, the prizes and benefiter of your raffle must not be changed. 

Raffle Tickets

A good benchmark single ticket price is $20, although a larger prize could allow for up to $35 ticket prices. It is recommended to offer ticket bundles or offers, such as Buy 6 get 1 free and Buy 10 get 2 free to promote the sale of tickets and get people excited with a higher chance of winning.

When setting the price of your tickets you also need to consider that this will be a GST-inclusive price and you will be required to pay GST on these ticket sales. Vega allows you to set your ticket GL code with a GST rate and show this breakdown in the receipt, as well as being included in payment reports. Any donation added on top of a ticket purchase will not include GST.

As the organisation running the raffle, none of your staff will be allowed to purchase a raffle ticket.

Raffle Promotion

The success of your raffle campaign depends heavily on how well you promote it, so we're outlining the best tricks to do this successfully. You're able to promote your raffle across many sources, using social media, your website, any partner websites, emails, telefundraising callers, direct mail, and face to face.

You should utilise all social media platforms to promote your raffle, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn are all valuable sources to reach a wider audience. You can also include social share options in your ticket fulfillment document, asking purchasers to share your page and let everyone know that they have bought a ticket in the raffle. Your social media pages should regularly promote the raffle with a link directly to your webpage hosting the raffle widget.

It's very easy to embed your raffle widget on your website, this will then be available to all traffic coming onto your website. The same widget can also be embedded on other websites, this means any of your partners or associated contacts can also embed this widget on their webpage to promote your campaign. All transactions processed through the widget, no matter what webpage was used, will process the payment through your connected payment gateway and record the transaction in your Vega account.

Vega also provides an easy way to reach your contact database via email and include a direct link to your raffle webpage for easy purchasing. Emails can be sent from within the raffle action itself to record a set of recipients to allow you to monitor the success of this promotion.