Charity raffle fundraising, planned and run right
Practical guides, proven strategies, and expert insights to help your organization run successful, compliant, and honest raffles.
Churches run more raffles through us than anyone else, and it shows in how deep the church guides on this site go. Food banks, veteran posts, medical charities, and civic clubs run raffles too, and the fundamentals underneath all of them are the same.
Seven kinds of organizations, one set of fundamentals
Churches and parishes are our biggest group by a wide margin, which is why the deepest guide on this site starts there. Here’s who else calls the hotline just as often.
Churches & Parishes
Spring and fall raffles, decades of retention.
→ Church Raffle GuideVeterans Organizations
50/50s at the post, weekly Queen of Hearts boards.
Guide comingFood Banks
Community wide raffles, every dollar visible.
Guide comingMedical Charities
One big jackpot raffle a year, high trust required.
Guide comingDomestic Violence Organizations
Privacy-sensitive promotion, careful public storytelling.
Guide comingAnimal Rescues
Prize baskets built by local sponsors.
Guide comingCivic & Fraternal Clubs
Rotary, Lions, Elks, lodges, scholarship funds.
Guide comingFour things that are true almost everywhere we work
-
01
It’s on the calendar before anyone volunteers
Parishes run it every spring and fall. VFW posts run it every week. A hospital foundation runs it once a year, at the gala. Whatever the rhythm, it’s decided before anyone raises a hand to run it.
-
02
The cash doesn’t go away
The envelope after the collection, the cash box at the fish fry, the bills in a jar at the front desk. That money has to end up in the same drawing as the online tickets, or you’ve run two raffles and neither is fair.
-
03
Whoever ran it last year isn’t running it this year
The volunteer who finally learned the software moved on. Whatever you pick has to be learnable by somebody who’s never seen it, with no training budget and no handoff.
-
04
Somebody on the board will ask what it costs
And they’ll have seen an ad that said free. It’s a fair question and it deserves a real answer with arithmetic in it, not a brochure. We gave it its own page.
The cash is what breaks most raffle software
Most raffle sites only sell tickets online. So the cash lives in a spreadsheet, the paper books live in a shoebox, and on the Saturday before the drawing somebody merges all three by hand and hopes.
To be clear about who does what. Chance2Win doesn’t run your raffle. Your organization manages the fundraiser, sets the ticket price, writes the rules, and picks the winner. We provide the website your team uses to run it correctly.
Four ways organizations run this
The traditional draw
One prize or a few, one drawing, numbered tickets. Online, in person, or both in the same pool.
The basket raffle
Tricky tray, Chinese auction, basket raffle. Each prize has its own ticket pool, and each can ask for a different number of tickets.
Queen of Hearts
A progressive weekly draw on a 54-card board. Supporters select a card, one is revealed each week, and the jackpot builds until the queen turns up.
Duck race and ball drop
Numbered ducks or balls sold online ahead of the event, released with everybody watching.
Chance2Win handles all four natively. That’s the argument, and it’s more honest than price, since on price we aren’t always the cheapest and we’d rather say so than have you find out.
The one that changed how we talk about this
We picked this story because it’s the most dramatic one we have on file. We could tell a similar one about a VFW hall or a food pantry. The pattern repeats across every group listed above.
A picnic raffle that got away from everyone
A gentleman called about a small fundraiser for children in need, run through a small church in a town with maybe two stoplights. He hoped the raffle might bring in a few thousand dollars.
Then supporters started sharing it. Orders came in from outside the town, then outside the state, then from all over the country.
Final numbers: 17,369 tickets. $351,100.
About the wine, the bourbon, and the prizes nobody mentions
Wine baskets, bourbon, cigars, and at some organizations, a firearm. Most card processors prohibit those categories in their written terms. Enforcement is another matter, and that gap is where organizations get hurt.
| Processor | What it is | Those categories |
|---|---|---|
| Flux Payments | A merchant account | Allowed in writing, all four. |
| Stripe | A processor | Prohibited in their terms. |
| Square | A processor | Prohibited in their terms. |
| Fortis, via Authorize.net | A merchant account | All four. |
We hear about suspended accounts more than most, because we’re one of the few places that takes these events and we answer the phone. That’s a biased sample, not a base rate.
What it costs, in two sentences
Zero Fee
Costs your organization nothing. A fixed 12% service charge goes onto the supporter’s total, disclosed before checkout. You keep 100% of the ticket price.
Suits raffles under $10,000Premium, from $329
Your organization pays for the website. $329 up to $5,000, $459 up to $10,000, then $329 per additional $10,000.
Suits raffles over $10,000Some organizations add a service charge of their own on Premium, at whatever amount they pick, and it all goes to them rather than to us. Some do. Most don’t, including most of our largest fundraisers.
Where to go from here
Raffle and charitable gaming laws vary by state and we don’t operate in every one of them. Nothing on this site is legal advice.
We’ll look at your raffle before you sell anything
Every organization goes through a review before tickets go on sale. It isn’t a sales call. It’s the step that catches a raffle structure that was never going to work.