Selling tickets locally

Promoting your raffle online is great but you’ve got to make a huge effort locally as well. Before you set out to sell those tickets take a look at a few tips to make it a bit easier…

- Focus your sales at first on any and all community “leaders” in your area including top school admin, town and county officials, prominent business owners, religious leaders and so on. You should be able to sell some tickets and more importantly get these folks to tell you which of their friends are “into” your raffle prize, like a Harley or an old car. Sort of like a referral deal…you’ll be able to approach these friends and say “Principle Bob from the high school said you are a Harley guy! Wanna buy a ticket?” or “The mayor told me I had to talk to you because you are a huge Mustang fan!” Sort of some friendly peer pressure - all’s fair in love and selling raffle tickets.

- Approach your local TV and radio stations and get on the air with your raffle. Either bring the car or bike to them or have them come to you. It’s a good story…”Local non-profit for farm education to raffle off a brand new harley Davidson!” You might be surprised who says “yes” to helping you promote the raffle.

- Raffling a bike? Is it from a local harley dealership? If so see if you can keep it there with a big “Win this Bike” sign on it. If not see if you can find a good central location in town with a good amount of foot traffic - maybe a big car dealer, in a mall, or something along those lines. Having the actual bike on display, where people can see/touch it seems to work out better than pictures on a flyer. If you can tell people where to go see it you’ve got a better chance of buying a ticket.

- Approach your local religious institutions and see if the priest, rabbi, etc. will mention your raffle before/after the ceremony, in their bulletin and so on. Take advantage of a captive audience.

- Offer something along with a raffle ticket purchase like a free car wash or a free meal from a local restaurant. Of course the local restaurant would donate you the meals in exchange for the free advertising. Some thing goes go offering other items that local business may donate to you to help out like a free pizza, move rentals, movie tickets and so on. You’d of course promote those businesses along with your raffle, “Thanks to John Doe’s Pizza House for donating pizza!” or whatever.

- Does your organization have a website? Drive customers to your website where your raffle is displayed as well.If you don’t yet have an online email list I highly suggest starting one. These can be a huge and very cheap method of promoting and selling raffle tickets. See a how to article here - Setting up an email list.

- See if you can “piggy back” on someone else’s mailing list, either email or snail mail. If you have a contact in Real Estate find an agent who regularly sends out a mailing. Sometimes agents will send out hundreds or thousands of mailings a month. I’ll bet you could find a real estate agent that would let you slip a raffle flyer, (or a blurb and picture in their email newsletter), into their mailing one month. Of course you’d praise that agent and give them some free advertising as well!

What other raffle selling tips do you use? Lemme know! Thanks