Online charity raffles offer a great opportunity to raise funds and establish relationships with your audience while rapidly growing your donor base. Charitable raffles also allow participants to win life-changing amounts, providing a huge incentive for supporters to participate. The more people know about your online charity raffle, the bigger its potential success will be. In this article, we will discuss a few tips and best practices tips that will help you market your online charity raffle effectively.
What are online charity raffles?
An online charity raffle is a fundraiser that is organized, launched, and run via the internet. With online charity raffles, people participate by purchasing tickets and winner(s) are selected through random draws. Technology is used to sell tickets, select winners, and distribute prizes. 50/50 and Catch the Ace are the two most commonly utilized online charity raffle formats and offer a great opportunity to gamify the process of raising funds while helping nonprofits increase their reach.
50/50 charity raffle: As the name suggests, the 50/50 charity raffle is when the prize pool is split between the organizing charity and the winner. The pot is funded through ticket sales and the winner is selected through a random draw. Repeat draws every month help garner momentum and acquire larger funds.
Catch the Ace: Also known as the Queen of Hearts or Chase the Ace, this type of online charity raffle is typically run for 52 weeks or until the Ace of Spades is found. The lottery has weekly draws where the winner gets to win a portion of the proceeds from ticket sales. If the Ace is found, the winner also takes the jackpot home. If not, then the chosen card is removed from the deck and the proceeds are rolled over for the next draw.
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The basics of running successful online charity raffles
1. Know your audience well
Marketing your online charity raffle, just like marketing a for-profit business, has a lot to do with your understanding of your target audience — demographics, what motivates them, which social channels they use, which causes they care about, etc. This information will be crucial as you plan paid media campaigns.
2. Budget for your online charity raffle
Budget should be another consideration as you decide to market for your online charity raffle. The first step is to understand the expendable budget for a campaign. Next, craft a marketing plan that can maximize your reach while staying budget-friendly. Do remember to budget for any unforeseen expenses. Social media and email marketing are the two most budget-friendly channels that you can utilize to maximize returns.
3. Analyze past metrics to see what works
Historical data can offer great insights into which strategies should best be employed when it comes to promoting and marketing your online charity raffle. Do you always get the best response from social media or has email marketing proven to be more effective? What about print ads and peer-to-peer networking? Analyze past results and plan accordingly.
4. Plan your social media strategy
Today, the entire world is online. People are spending two hours and six minutes on social media everyday in North America and they prefer to interact and engage with their favorite businesses and charities online. Therefore, crafting a robust social strategy as part of your marketing efforts for your online charity raffle is imperative. This may include collaborating with influencers for shout-outs, running paid ads on social media, or even being more consistent with posting.
5. Decide on your communications strategy
A communication strategy entails devising a detailed plan for how you will communicate with your target audience, including the channels you will use, content to be shared, brand voice/tone, etc. A well-thought-out communications strategy can effectively maximize success for your online charity raffle.
Tips and best practices for marketing an online charity raffle
1. Create a high-conversion landing page
The landing page is a page where a website visitor lands. It is meant to be conversion-focused. When running an online raffle, your landing page dedicated will seek to convert a visitor into a ticket buyer. Here’s how you can magnify the impact of your landing page:
- Use clear and concise headlines: The headlines and subheadings on this page should be carefully thought-out, clear, concise and impactful. It should outline the cause that the raffle fundraiser will support, and inspire and motivate visitors to buy tickets.
- Main body text: Making donations towards a worthy cause is an emotional act. Use the body copy on your landing page to help customers ‘feel’. Share a compelling story and highlight how their participation will impact the beneficiaries or help your cause.
- Call-to-action: Typically, a call to action should be clear, above the fold, and prominently placed. This button is integral to the main conversion action of the landing page.
2. Use email marketing to increase participation
Charities and nonprofits regularly see incredible success with their email marketing campaigns. When marketing your online charity raffle, here are some email marketing tips to keep in mind:
- Use donor segmentation: Donor segmentation is a process of dividing your donor base into multiple segments such as demographics, gift size, giving frequency, income levels, etc. This helps you build more meaningful email fundraising campaigns, improve engagement levels, increase donor retention, and attract more advocates to your cause.
- Use a compelling subject line and tell a good story: Most recipients decide whether an email is worth opening or not based on the subject line alone. Once a recipient opens your email, your email should capture and retain their attention by using good storytelling and guiding them towards the ultimate conversion which in this case is participation in your online charity raffle.
- Optimize for web and mobile: Most people use handheld or mobile devices to check their emails. This makes it essential to ensure that your emails are responsive and render optimally on all device types.
3. Use social media more effectively
Social media forms an important part of the marketing mix simply because most people spend a lot of time on it everyday. Here are some tips and best practices to ensure high engagement levels.
- Be consistent with posting content: Frequent posting across social media platforms ensures that your engagement levels are rapidly increasing.
- Use a variety of content: Be sure to include a variety of videos and photos on social to ensure interaction rates increase consistently.
- Share wins: Share inspiring stories about communities that are benefiting due to your charitable endeavors. Also share interesting information such as people who won life-changing amounts with your previous online charitable raffles.
- Expand your reach through collaborations: Another great tip to keep in mind is to deliberately and consistently find individuals and organizations with values that align with yours for collaborations so you expand your reach and spread the word about your online charity raffle.
4. Explore paid media opportunities
For more time sensitive pursuits such as encouraging more participation for your upcoming online charity raffle and targeting the right audience, it is best to utilize paid media such as radio ads, print media, paid socials, retargeting campaigns, etc. The most important point to remember here is to go back to seeing who your target audience is and then seeing where you are most likely to capture eyeballs.
- Don’t hesitate to have an advertising budget: Due to the very nature of charitable work, nonprofit organizations find it difficult to allocate advertising budgets and instead prefer to use that money to advance the charity’s cause. It’s important to remember that actually allocating money for advertising and/or marketing means that you are growing your nonprofit in the long run by increasing donations, registrations, and in this case participation for your online charity raffle.
- Use low-cost efforts to achieve major returns: Digital advertising usually requires you to spend only a few hundred dollars and end up raising thousands of dollars. By utilizing audience segmentation and targeting relevant demographics, you essentially lower your cost while increasing the output.
An online charity raffle presents the best way to raise funds while raising awareness towards your cause and simultaneously growing your donor base. It is easy to set up and run and requires little or no upfront costs. Set up an online raffle today and use these marketing tips for maximum impact.
