How to Run a Raffle

How to run a raffle feels like it should take five minutes to explain, and then you meet the school fair committee that printed 1,000 tickets, sold 180 and spent the last hour of the afternoon trying to give away a hamper with a tin of pilchards in it. The raffles that raise proper money aren’t complicated, they’re just planned backwards from the amount you need. So let’s do that with a real number: £500 for a junior football club’s new kit.

Start with how much you want to raise

If the prizes are donated, every ticket you sell goes straight to the kit fund, and at £2 a ticket you need to sell 250. If you’re buying prizes, the cost gets added to the target before you do that sum. The CasinoCalcs raffle ticket price calculator works it both ways, so you can start from the price or from the target.

Now the honest check. A summer fete with 150 people through the gate, where roughly half buy a £5 strip of three, sells about 225 tickets. That’s close, and twenty or thirty sold to parents in the week before gets you there. If your event is half that size, either the price goes up or the target comes down, and it’s much better to know that in May than on the day.

Prizes worth buying a ticket for

One prize people actually want will sell more tickets than a table groaning with bath sets. A weekend away, dinner for two at the place everyone in town talks about, or a shirt signed by the local club’s captain is the sort of thing that makes someone buy a second strip. The wine and chocolates still have a job to do, filling out the table so the odds feel friendly, and in our experience local shops say yes more often than people expect when you tell them how many people will see their name on the prize list.

Buyers like knowing their chances, too. Sell 250 tickets with 10 prizes and each ticket has a 1 in 25 shot at something, which is a surprisingly persuasive thing to have written on the poster. The raffle odds calculator works it out for any number of tickets and prizes.

Tickets, stubs and keeping track of the money

The old cloakroom tickets with a tear-off stub are still the best system going, because the buyer walks off with a number and the stub, with their name and phone number scribbled on the back, goes in the drum. If you’d rather print your own, the raffle ticket generator lays them out on A4. Running out halfway through the afternoon is far more expensive than a spare book of tickets, so err on the side of too many.

The part that goes wrong is the money when four or five people are selling in advance. Somebody always ends up with a book of numbers and no clear idea who paid for them, which is why we built the raffle ticket tracker: each sale gets logged with the numbers and whether it’s paid, and the total owed sits at the top.

Doing the draw

People decide whether a raffle was fair in the thirty seconds of the draw, so it’s worth making a little bit of theatre of it. A proper mix of the stubs in a drum or a bag, a hand from someone who hasn’t bought a ticket (the vicar and the headteacher are traditional for a reason), and every number read out twice. Winners usually choose from the table in the order they’re drawn. If someone isn’t there, the decent thing is to set their prize aside and ring them, unless the poster said otherwise.

When tickets were sold online or ahead of time, an on-screen draw does the same job, provided it only picks from numbers that were actually sold. The raffle tracker’s draw button does exactly that, and so does the random number generator if you set the range carefully.

How a meat raffle works

A meat raffle is the pub version, and the prizes are exactly what it says: a tray of chops, a joint of beef, a pack of sausages and bacon. It runs in rounds through the evening. Tickets go round the bar for each round, a pound or two each, the draw happens there and then, and the winner takes the meat home. Some pubs use a numbered wheel instead of tickets.

The sums are simple. Ten rounds with 40 tickets at £1 bring in £400; if the butcher’s trays cost £15 each, that’s £150 on prizes and £250 for the darts team or the charity. Keep the meat chilled until it’s handed over, and the same local rules apply as for any other raffle.

Other fundraising draws

A raffle isn’t always the right tool. In a pub or clubhouse a football card fills up quicker, a tombola suits a fete where people want to know straight away whether they’ve won, and a penny raffle works brilliantly with lots of small prizes. A 50/50 draw splits the takings with the winner, chase the ace rolls a jackpot over week to week, and a bonus ball sheet runs off the Saturday Lotto draw. Whatever you pick, keep the prices modest and the rules on the poster, and have a word with your local council before selling tickets ahead of the event, since rules on advance sales vary from place to place.