50/50 tickets for fundraising

Web Sales
#1

I am new to Theatre Manager, we just completed our training at the College. I am looking at doing an online 50/50 tickets sold through TM ticketing. Has anyone set this up before? Any advice on how to do it?
Cheers,
Emma

#2

Hi @developmentccpa and welcome to Community!

I’m sure there’s more than one way to accomplish this, but the Box Office and I brainstormed quickly and our first instinct is the following:

  • Build a simple general admission event for the raffle using only 1 price code
  • Make the performance the final day of the drawing
  • Set the main accounts to the correct development/fundraising account
  • Set one of the fee accounts to whatever your finance department would like to use for holding the patron payout funds (“held for others”)
  • Set the base price to half of the final per ticket price (if you have a discount for batches of multiple tickets, then perhaps setup a second price code and promotion and make sure the promotions exclude the non-relevant price code)
  • Create a dedicated promotion that adds the second half of the ticket price to whichever fee line you put your “held for others” account in
  • Put on sale as normal - you can list any special instructions in the performance notes for the webstore
  • Once all the sales are done, you can run a mail list of ticket holders to the event and then use the “random” feature to pull a secondary list with randomly selected winner(s)

We’ve typically taken raffle money in via a donation campaign, but it’s never been a 50/50 in structure and we’ve rarely put it up online. I think an event will operate most like what patrons expect online and will easily allow you to separate the funds to keep and the funds to give away in different accounts for your finance department.

I’m curious to hear what others have done though!

#3

Thank you so much for your suggestions, I have found that our gaming rules have made it more difficult to process payments online. We need to actually print the tickets and mail them, which postage becomes a huge cost. I am searching how, we can do it more cost effiently. I did think of using the gift card feature and the patrons purchase one and we create the ticket in the back end.

Thank you for your reply, very much appericated.
Emma

#4

Hi Emma,
To avoid mail costs we scanned and emailed the completed raffle ticket (that we had pre-printed) to the patron before separating and putting the stub into the draw.
We would love for TM to have the ability to allow us to sell the tickets online and have the numbered ticket automatically sent to the buyer.
Hmm - one day!
Sioban

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