Standalone Raffle Solution

Bobby Steurer

Hi all,


Not sure where to post this, so adding here in hopes that someone can direct it to the right place.


We have an annual raffle that has many manual components. It starts as its own page on our website, where buyers can purchase as many tickets they'd like. From there, the transaction hits OLX, where it gets batched and committed to each donors' record. From there, a report is run several times a day and a team of raffle staff and volunteers manually create raffle ticket numbers, physical receipts, and other items for a packet to be sent to the purchaser in the mail. This is a very tedious process, but it works.


With COVID this year and many of our usual volunteer staff unavailable to do that manual processing, our hope has been to find an all-in-one digital solution to help us this year. Our ultimate goal is this:

-Buyer goes to the site and purchases the amount of raffle tickets they'd like

-Ticket numbers are automatically generated and assigned at checkout, which would automatically be emailed to the buyer. The email acts as their electronic ticket (we are able to do that in our state, so long as disclosures about chances, etc. are provided).

-All transactions are easily exportable from the software so as to be imported into Raiser's Edge via batch (we use Importacular, and it's really handy for massive donation imports like this).


We use One Cause for our event management, and it's great. However, there are a few drawbacks to trying our desired raffle scenario through them, and we've discovered the same with some other software we've looked into: limited to one purchase per person, as the software acts more as a registration than raffle component; issues with assigning sellers to tickets; no auto generation of ticket numbers; manual workarounds by creating additional raffle tickets as Fixed Price Items; etc...


My thinking is there's *got to be* some standalone solution out there that does what we're looking for. It's sort of hard to believe there's nothing that will simply let people purchase raffle tickets and automatically assign ticket numbers with easily-pulled reports, but maybe that's just wishful thinking. I've seen Accelevents and Greater Giving mentioned on the Community boards before - are they able to do something like this without having a million workarounds?


Thanks in advance. The Community's help is always very appreciated and valuable.


-Bobby

 

JoAnn Strommen

I'm not aware of software with this capability.  Someone should develop it. 

"(we use Importacular, and it's really handy for massive donation imports like this)." - your use of 'donations' was in reference to imports but just a reminder for anyone doing raffles that ticket purchases are not charitable donations. Considered gaming/gambling and fall under other city/state regs.

Spencer Lassen

I was looking into this the other day and ran across these folks https://www.smartthing.org/blog/lottery-and-raffle-parts-for-blackbaud-cms/ and it looks promising for what you're looking for and says it integrates with both CRM and RE so could be worth reaching out.  


I didn't have time to do that so I ended up implementing a custom solution in our BBIS environment using our Advanced Donation Form and then just a little bit of SQL on the backend to auto assign numbers which I tracked as revenue attributes and used the attribute values to generate emails, so not fully automated but only ended up being about 20 minutes of work a day to send out ticket numbers to folks regardless of how many tickets were sold.  

Kylea Johnson

In my state, raffle tickets can only be purchased "in-person", and cannot be purchased on the internet. I live in Washington state, and attached the relevant rules. Your state might be different, but you may want to double check! If this is common in most states, that's probably why there's no software for it. = )

Bobby Steurer

In my state, raffle tickets can only be purchased "in-person", and cannot be purchased on the internet. I live in Washington state, and attached the relevant rules. Your state might be different, but you may want to double check! If this is common in most states, that's probably why there's no software for it. = )

All good in my state, Kylea Johnson‍ ,but that ruling being so common is, like you said, likely why we ultimately had no luck finding an alternative software solution this year. Oh well!