Running a Lottery

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Matt Page
Matt Page ✭
Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 2 Photogenic
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussion
Does anyone here work for an organisation that runs a lottery? (i.e. weekly/monthly)

If so, do you administer it in RE or use a different piece of software and have to import, export and try and tie the two databases together?



We fall in the latter camp at the moment and use a dodgy bit of software, but I'm wondering if it could all be done in RE, or if there's a better bit of software that would play more nicely with RE.



Matt
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  • Stephanie Ulmer
    Stephanie Ulmer ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 2 Photogenic
    We no longer do a lottery. But what are you trying to accomplish with the tracking, etc?
  • Matt Page
    Matt Page ✭
    Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 2 Photogenic
    Thanks Stephanie,



    We've run a lottery for about 20 years, but it's been run as a largely separate entity from our fundraising department (run on RE). Completely different databases, with different rules for how records are composed and differing field formats. The lottery software programme is antiquarian and moving data from one to the other is a massive hassle. We have about 25k current payers and about 15k cancelled players. We have about 135k supporters on RE which incorporates more than half but rather less than 100% of these lottery players.



    The ideal would be to use RE to run the lottery, but it doesn't have a module for this and I'm a little unsure on the legal requirements we'd need to have in place to do this. Nor what it would mean practically. And with so many other things that need doingg I'm not sure when I'm going to be able to put the time aside to do the research.



    Another option would be to use a new, up-to-date, lottery software which would play more nicely with RE and amend some of the data entry rules at the same time.



    So if anyone does use RE for this I'd be all ears as to how they do it and what challenges they have and how they set it up and gained the necessary legal approval.



    But if anyone uses another piece of software I'd ike to know what it was, and how easy they found it to switch between one and the other.

     
  • JoAnn Strommen
    JoAnn Strommen ✭✭✭✭✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 4 Name Dropper Photogenic
    Matthew, if you haven't you may want to post your question about 'lottery' software on the fund services website www.fundsvcs.org.  Fundraising forums with users of many softwares.  Or search there for similar questions.
  • Jocelyn Brulotte
    Jocelyn Brulotte ✭
    Ancient Membership Photogenic First Reply
    Hi Matthew,



    I've worked for a couple of organizations that run lotteries. One utilized RE and my current one does not. Legalities for gaming activities are unique to jurisdictions in some respects, I imagine. We did not have to obtain approval for the software through our regulatory body, that I am aware of. One of the largest challenges with running through RE was ticket numbering. As you mentioned, RE does not have a lottery module, so we created ticket number and name on ticket as gift attributes. The numbers and names had to be manually entered (with inevitable errors) making the reconciliation process a bit hairy, prior to ticket printing. Another issue that presented a challenge was split gifts (but those can be challenging in general when it comes to reporting).



    My current org utilizes a database that works reasonably well for our lottery needs, but does not communicate with RE at all, and there has not been an import/export process set up. We know we have ticket purchasers in our RE database (donor database) and vice versa, but exporting from the lotto database is limited and the thought of field matching for an import makes me shudder. With Import-o-matic it might be do-able but this organization hasn't budget to invest in that software at this point.



    Feel free to contact me directly for more details... and I'll be following this thread with interest, as I'm curious what other organization use for lotteries. Our current software has limitations other than connecting with RE, so I've been considering a pitch to invest in something different, but have found it difficult to find something!



    Good luck,

    Jocelyn
  • Elaine Tucker
    Elaine Tucker ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 2 Name Dropper Photogenic
    We do not do a lottery, but for those that do, could you not use the GIFT ID as the ticket number?

    The gift ID's are unique to each gift, so there would be no duplication of ticket numbers; of course as I'm writing this, that does not allow for multiple ticket purchases in one transaction.



     

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