Tracking Raffle Tickets

Erica Warner · March 2016

Hello All,We currently have a raffle for our upcoming event where people may purchase 1 ticket for $30 or 2 tickets for $50. We have multiple people in and out of the organization willing to help us sell. We just got back a bunch of tickets and are wondering what is the best way to track them in the system? We do not want to add an individual record for every person because we are already trying to "de-clutter" our database. We thought what if we created an organization or individual record called "Raffle" and we just put all misc. tickets in there. Our questions in, what would you all do?

Barbara Van Handel · March 2016

We created an organization record to record these. Looking back I would have rather had an individual record created as the tickets were bought by individuals and reporting would have been reflected more accurately. We created different records depending on the type of raffle, in case someone wanted to know what type had done better, such as Bucket Raffle, 50/50 Raffle.

Nicole S · March 2016

If I have a name and address, I put the individual in RE. It may seem like clutter, but I also think it's good data. With an address, I can mail or run a wealth screening. For anyone that I don't have a name and address for I put on an anonymous record and I can group all of the raffle tickets with other coding that we use like funds and events.

Erica Warner · March 2016

Thank you both for your help. I will go back with these suggestions to my supervisor.

Petra Hall · March 2016

Our local rules require that we can trace every person who bought a raffle ticket. After several years of purchase data we're starting to see some useful trends.

Yes, it's a pain, but still worth it in the long run.

Patti Hommes, bCRE-PRO · March 2016

If you have the Event module you can set up the Raffle as an event and the ticket purchasers as registrants. That way you can store any contact info you have in the Event participant record without making them all constituents. If you do not have RE Events, then I agree with Petra, you should make them all constituents.

Cathie Pelchat · March 2016

We hosted our first raffle last year - 6 months long, over 10,000 tickets sold at $5 each, and we tracked every donor for auditting purposes - it helped that we only allowed ticket purchases online on our website (a NetCommunity event form), and we used the NetCommunity plugin to expedite processing those raffle tickets. As Patti suggested, we used the Event module: registered ticket buyers to that event, and linked their registration to the related gift in their constituent record. This turned out to be a really challenging way to pull the final list of raffle tickets, and luckily, we had tracked all gifts in the donor gift tab. I would not recommend relying on the Event module to manage your raffle.

If the money is anonymous, I'd put in an Anonymous constituent record, track it by Appeal and link it to the event record.

Melissa Dunham · March 2016

We've gone back and forth on how to track purchases of raffle tickets and whether to group all under "anonymous" or by individual record. Obviously, if we don't know who bought the tickets it's entered under "anonymous". For those people who pay with a check, we enter it as a gift under their individual record but with a gift attribute of raffle. Since money given for raffle tickets is not tax deductible, we need to track those amounts and make sure our thank you letter for that donation doesn't include language about being tax deductible.

JoAnn Strommen · March 2016

I totally get the idea of doing all possible to foster donor relations/thank yous for all gifts, etc. That said, while I'm not a frequent purchaser of raffle tickets, I have never gotten a thank you for purchasing a raffle ticket. I recognize there's a huge difference between a $1-5 ticket and a $100 or more raffle ticket. Since, as stated, the raffle ticket is not tax deductible, there are not any requirements for a receipt/thank you to the purchaser that I'm aware of. While a thank you sounds nice, I think orgs also need to consider the amount of time by development staff/gift entry if you're manually entering tickets for very small amounts and the costs involved to issue a thank you. Seems like most of us have enought 'required' work to do.

Just my 2 cents...

Another comment for the newer RE users: most orgs do have a record (some more than one) where they record 'anonymous' gifts/purchases, etc. To prevent confusion with gifts where donor requests to be anonymous and RE users interpretation of 'anonymous', we use the name 'Unknown Donor' for this record, not 'Anonymous.' For us it's prevented all potential confusion for gift entry and reports.

Tracking Raffle Tickets

Comments

Categories