We do quite a bit of work with schools and nonprofits, and as such we’ve implemented a few online auctions. We were recently asked about setting up a system to sell raffle tickets online—a new prospect altogether. To choose the right tool, we’ll want to find one that has low transaction costs, offers a good user experience, can be embedded in a website, and allows for tickets to be sold in person too. But before we even get started, there’s an important hurdle to clear. Is it legal?
Every state has different laws about whether raffles are allowed as fundraising tools. In many states, gambling and/or online gambling are illegal, while some make exceptions for nonprofits. If an online raffle is allowed, you’ll have to restrict ticket purchases to people in that state. And there may be many other restrictions as well, related to how large the prize can be, how prizes must be dealt with for tax purposes, and how often such raffles can be held. We recommend checking with your state’s Attorney General before proceeding to the next point.
If your raffle is a go, legally speaking, a number of potential options await you to help you manage it.
Raffle River
Raffle River makes it easy to set up a raffle page or widget that can be embedded on your website. In a 5-minute process, you simply explain your cause, indicate where people can buy tickets (either in person or online), and upload some pictures. Stripe is the payment processor, charging 2.9% + 30¢ pehr transaction. Raffle River does not charge any additional fee on top of it. You can even choose whether the nonprofit or the buyer pays the fee. For online sales, the buyer receives an email confirmation with a digital ticket.
1,000 tickets at $40 each
2.9% of $40,000 = $1,160
30¢ for each ticket = $300*
Total: $1,460
*(This number won’t be exactly accurate, as it assumes that each of the 1,000 tickets was bought separately. If one person bought 999 tickets and another person bought 1 ticket, this number would be 60¢ instead of $300.)
For offline sales, you can invite ticket sellers to the platform and share a digital “leaderboard” that encourages healthy competition. Ticket sellers report their own sales. Raffle River partners with ticketprinting.com to offer printed raffle tickets for about 8¢ each.
One last note: Raffle River does integrate with Google Analytics and Facebook Pixels for tracking purposes.
RallyUp
RallyUp’s interface is a little slicker than Raffle River’s, but it functions similarly. You can have a raffle page on their website or embed a widget in your own website. RallyUp’s pricing is a little more complicated. They offer a “DIY” plan with no upfront cost, a 5% platform fee, and an unspecified gateway fee (i.e., a fee for using a credit card processor, which might range from $10-30). If you’re willing to pay $199 per month, you could bring your platform fee down to 2.9%. If your raffle takes place over only one month, your expenses look something like this:
1,000 tickets at $40 each
2.9% of $40,000 = $1,160
$199 per month subscription fee
Plus unspecified gateway fee ($30?)
Total: $1,389?
RallyUp does offer more sophisticated ordering options than Raffle River. When setting the price of raffle tickets, you can also offer discounted entry packs for multiple ticket purchases. And you can allow donors to buy any ticket to win any prize, or buy different tickets to win specific prizes. You can even customize your thank-you message and you can control what name ticket buyers see on their credit card statements.
Like Raffle River, RallyUp also allows tickets to be sold offline by enabling “Physical Tickets” in your raffle campaign. Allowing others to enter physical ticket tallies requires that you make ticket sellers administrators on the campaign; it’s not like Raffle River, where ticket sellers can enter their ticket sales into the system and compete.
One cool feature that RallyUp offers that Raffle River doesn’t: it will choose your raffle winner for you (if you want). You can set it to choose the winner automatically at the end of the raffle campaign, or when you decide to trigger it.
RallyUp, like Raffle River, does not offer printed raffle tickets.
Accelevents
Accelevents’ system for setting up raffle tickets is similar to Raffle River’s and RallyUp’s, allowing you to set up a page on their website or embed a widget into your own website. For selling tickets in person, you can use a “Staff Page,” where you can accept credit cards, checks, or cash and issue digital tickets. These digital tickets are emailed or texted to the buyer, eliminating any need for printed raffle tickets. Bonus: this all-digital system translates to real-time updates for proceeds raised. Accelevents also allows you to export reports based on your data, a feature we haven’t seen on any other platform.
The Accelevents pricing model is unique, charging a $99 activation fee for each raffle and $1 per participant. No percentage of the funds you raise is taken. Sell 1,000 tickets, and you’ll spend $1,099, making it the least expensive of these three platforms.
Accelevents also integrates with Google Analytics, and it is designed to be shared on social media.
There don’t seem to be as many players in this space as you might think. We’ve found three other alternatives to the three products above, but did not research them as thoroughly, for various reasons.
- RaffleReady – its website copyright date was 2016, making us concerned that this platform might be abandoned.
- Raffle Creator – we may look into this one further, but the website’s poor user experience makes worried about the user experience for ticket buyers will be unpleasant; to sell 1,000 tickets, their pricing model would make costs equal to Raffle River, plus an additional $250 fee to use the platform.
- Chance2Win – the website gives you almost no information about the user experience; for 1,000 tickets at $40 each, they would charge $499 for their package plus 2.9% of the total, so $1,659; they do not seem to offer a widget that can be embedded in a website.
