Raffles vs. wine drives: which raises more funds?

If you've helped run a fundraiser for your sports club, school or community group before, chances are you've run a raffle at some point. It's a fundraising staple across Australia. 

On paper, it sounds like a no-brainer: ask local shops and school families to donate items, wrap them up in a basket and sell $2 tickets for 100% profit.

In reality, running a traditional raffle is exhausting. Between door-knocking local businesses, nagging parents for hamper donations and spending time wrapping baskets in cellophane, many are left wondering: Is all this hassle actually worth the money raised?

Here's how the two actually compare.

The classic raffle

Raffles have been around forever, and there's a reason for that. They're simple, familiar and easy to explain to anyone. But behind the scenes, they usually rely on a fair bit of unpaid volunteer effort and that quietly caps how much you can raise.

The upsides:

• It's a familiar format, there's no real explaining needed
• Tickets are cheap, so almost anyone can grab a few
• If prizes are donated, there's little to no financial cost

The downsides:

• Someone has to source the prizes. This usually falls to a small group of volunteers who spend hours ringing around local businesses asking for donations or turning to their own community, sending out a message like "please bring a non-perishable item for the raffle hamper." That instantly puts supporters on the spot. They end up feeling squeezed twice, first having to buy something to donate, then being asked to buy tickets to try and win it back. You usually end up with a random pile of mismatched items that someone still has to make sense of.
• Then someone has to put it all together. Once the donations start coming in, someone still needs to sort them into hampers, wrap them up and get them ready to raffle off.
• Cheap tickets mean you need volume. Because tickets are usually only a few dollars each, you need a lot of people buying a lot of tickets just to raise a decent amount.
• Most people walk away with nothing. Only a handful of ticket holders actually win a prize. Everyone else is left with a stack of losing tickets and that can wear thin on the same supporters year after year.
• There's paperwork involved. In most Australian states, raffles above a certain prize value need a permit or licence, which is one more thing to sort out before you can even start selling tickets.

The case for wine drives

Wine drives work on a similar idea. Supporters buy something instead of just handing over a donation. But the effort involved and what supporters actually get out of it, looks pretty different.

The upsides:

• Better margins. Because Vinate sources the wine is sourced directly rather than passing through several layers of markup, your club typically keeps a much bigger share of each sale.
• No begging required. There's no need to ring around local businesses or chase supporters for donated items. The product is simply supplied to you, ready to sell.
• No hampers to wrap. Nobody on your committee needs to spend their weekend sorting donated goods into gift baskets and wrapping them in cellophane. The wine turns up ready to go.
• Everyone who buys actually gets something. Unlike a raffle, where most people walk away empty handed, every single wine drive purchase means the supporter gets a real product they actually chose and wanted.
• It's something people were buying anyway. Rather than an impulse "support the team" purchase, a wine drive taps into something supporters were probably going to buy regardless, whether that's dinner tonight, a gift for someone or their weekly shop. That means less pressure to convince anyone and more just redirecting a purchase they were already going to make.
• Orders tend to be bigger. A six pack, is a natural upsell in a way a single raffle ticket never really is. Supporters stocking up for a party, a gift or just the month tend to spend more per order.

A couple of things to keep in mind:

• Wine drives are only suitable for supporters aged 18 and over and age verification is required at deliveries.Worth factoring into how you promote it, since a raffle can go out to the whole school community while a wine drive is really aimed at the adults within it.
• As with any liquor related fundraiser in Australia, it's worth double checking your event or platform is operating under a proper liquor licensing arrangement before you launch.

Quick maths: hitting a $2,000 goal

Numbers make this easier to picture, so here's a rough example (example calculation only, your own numbers will vary depending on ticket price and margins).

Raffle Say tickets are $2 each, and because most of the prizes were donated, nearly all of that is profit. To hit $2,000, you'd need to sell around 1,000 tickets. That's a lot of people to reach and most of them will end up with nothing to show for it besides a losing ticket.

Wine drive Say your club earns roughly $20 on every mixed six pack sold. To hit that same $2,000 goal, you'd only need around 100 supporters to each buy one six pack. That's a tenth of the sales and every one walks away with something they wanted.

So which should your organisation run?

If your club has plenty of volunteers with the time and energy to chase donations, wrap hampers and manage ticket sales, a raffle can still work fine.

But if you're after a way to actually maximise what your club keeps, without the begging, the wrapping or the paperwork, a wine drive is hard to beat. Plenty of clubs find that switching from a traditional raffle to a wine fundraiser means raising the same amount or more, with a lot less time spent asking people for favours.