Raffles offer a great opportunity for charity organizations to get funds, interact, and establish contacts with likely patrons in the process. Organizing and managing one is a painstaking process, but even that’s not enough. You need a complete marketing plan built especially for your patrons and present the raffle on a silver platter. In this blog post, we’ll highlight strategies you can do exactly that.
Set goals according to your audience
Advertising medium, prizes and even imagery you use depend greatly on your target audience. Knowing your audience is the first step to a successfully marketed raffle.
Getting everyone
If you’re going for a wide net of people, consider using email and social media for advertising, as it reaches out to most demographics, without incurring heavy costs, as would be the case if advertising for television or via print media.
Prizes should be luxury products, such as an expensive watch, a car or an iPhone. In this case, it’s a must have to get sponsors, as only selling tickets will not cover the cost of the prizes, printing and advertising.
Pick your audience
Another equally valid option is to narrow down your audience, and find those who are likely to rally behind your cause. So if you have a charity that offers education and job security to young women in remote areas, many of your donors will also be women.
So you want to advertise wherever these women are, through social media, email or through offline advertisements such as banners, flyers in strategic places, such as near parlors, shopping malls or clothing outlets.
And you could apply this strategy for other causes, such as your own. A good way is to list a couple of traits of your perfect patron. The perfect patron is hypothetical person who wishes the best of you, while being a regular donor, participates in your events (including raffles) and has no reservations with your work. Then bring that perfect patron to life by listing some attributes and answering questions. Such as:
- What’s their gender?
- What’s their age?
- What’s their education level?
- What are their political ideals?
- What do they value?
- What are their interests?
- How much do they earn?
And you could think of even more questions, depending on their answers for these questions. Once you know your audience, you need to interest them, and that’s where advertising comes in.
Market with flyers
You know your audience, and you have a goal in mind. Now you can start creating content to market your raffle. Creating a raffle flyer with PosterMyWall saves you both time and money, and you have complete control over the design process.
When creating a flyer, arrange all necessary information so participants have everything they need to make a decision. This includes:
- Price of the ticket
- Description and/or pictures of the prizes
- Time of drawing
- Time when winners will be announced
- Purpose of the raffle and the charity behind it.
- Contact information
Create a Facebook event
Creating a Facebook event is free, and you should create one not only to gauge interest but also to rally interest and anticipation around the raffle. Share your event details on your Facebook page and on your Instagram. Sharing an event on Instagram is easy, by adding the event link to your page’s bio.
Consider promoting your raffle as it increases the chances of your event becoming viral, and Facebook ads also allow you to find and target the right people with the ad.
Update your Facebook cover
Redesign your organization page’s Facebook cover to a raffle announcement, so when anyone comes to your page, this is the first thing they see. Add a button near the Facebook cover. This will lead the customer to your Facebook event page.
The button, much like your Instagram profile’s bio link is a great way to direct your audience to your latest content.
Make sure your cover does the part by using something that catches interest quickly. Use a Facebook cover template to get a cover that fits in your Facebook page.
Print raffle tickets
Having eye-catching, fun raffle tickets is part of the raffle’s charm, and often the act of buying a ticket can come down to the subconscious part of the mind liking a pattern, or a color. Spend some time designing a ticket, made easy with our raffle ticket templates.
You could also get a professional to design you a ticket, but the process is costly, time consuming, and involves a lot of back and forth. Using a template skips all that, requiring you to add only your details, save and download.
Get behind the scenes
The rampant availability of story-style posts and live streaming services has made sneak peaks and off-camera stuff easy to show. And large brands nail it, and so can you. Here’s how you can incorporate this for your raffle:
- Show little bits of setting up, from an empty field to the final touches given to the venue. This also works for indoor venues.
- Follow individuals doing their day-to-day duties and (occasionally) ask about their work, and their opinions on the cause they and everyone’s working to fund.
- Impromptu interviews with the managers, along with little pep talks to get everyone excited.
This is a full-time job on it’s own, so make sure you have someone experienced with social media who’s constantly engaging with your audience via stories and live stream.
A two-way street
Creating and sharing content online will get you responses and that’s great. You will get questions, suggestions, and even complaints. Make sure you’re all ears and respond.
Keep yourself updated to messages, story replies, mentions (on Twitter) and post comments.
Why Stories?
Stories, on Instagram or elsewhere are a great medium for sharing behind the scenes content, as these updates are made in real-time, and are visible for only 24 hours, creating a sense of urgency.
But this strategy does not work in all cases, and depends on your audience. They may not even be on Instagram, or use stories.
Wrapping up
Once you’ve had a good look and done the following, you can be certain that the right people are aware and interested in your raffle. To some it all up, we discussed:
- Find your audience. Learn more about their interests and goals and create content accordingly.
- Create low cost, professional flyers with PosterMyWall and place them in strategic spots, where your audience is sure to find them.
- Spread the word on Facebook, by rallying your followers by creating an event. Update your Facebook cover and post about the raffle.
- Create eye-catching raffle tickets that double as great advertisements for your raffle.
- Update what goes around behind the scenes, to add a human touch to proceedings.
If you found this article useful, you can read up on ways your marketing campaign as a charity organization can make a difference.
