A tale of two raffle packs

So I was stuck at home last Friday. If you want to know the details, the Balcombe Tunnel was looking ‘a bit crumbly’ and so the Brighton-London line was closed while engineers assessed the likelihood of a collapse.

(Given that this stretch of line is associated with one of the UK’s worst-ever rail accidents, I’d say that was a good thing.)

Anyway, that’s not the point of this blog post.

The point is that I received two raffle packs in that morning’s mail, from two charities I don’t currently support (though as you’ll see, perhaps I should).

And those two raffle packs told an amazingly clear story about two approaches to fundraising.

Approach one: Get the money in. Your KPI’s are: get the money in. Your job is to: get the money in. ‘Brand’ is for wusses. ‘Awareness’ is for little girls. ‘Engagement’ is just wasting time. Get the money in, and get it in now. Then spend it on saving lives.

Approach two: Fundraising doesn’t exist in a vacuum. You have the opportunity to reach a wide audience. So as well as raising money you have the opportunity to raise awareness of the brand, and change attitudes about the cause. PS: you might raise less money.

The contrast between the two is a reminder that there’s more than one way to run a raffle.

The Asthma pack relegates the brand to an author for the raffle. Every trick and technique of classic direct marketing is used. This pack knows what it is about: response. Implied, perhaps, is an acceptance that the cause is less important than the chance to win a few bob. Given that two people a day die of asthma (and two of my four sons suffer with it to a greater or lesser degree) I’m not so sure. But maybe I would say that.

The Mencap pack foregrounds the cause. It is heavily branded. And the photo completely tugs at the heartstrings (again, full disclosure, one of my sons has autism and I know lots of really adorable kids with a learning disability). Respond or not, and you will have had an experience with the Mencap brand and the learning disability cause. It couldn’t be a more different approach.

In both of these cases, the numbers will tell a far more useful and nuanced story than I can. They will perhaps tell you that raffles are a valuable income stream, or a source of new prospects for regular giving, or a route to finding legacy prospects. Without the numbers, however, they outline a simple dichotomy that is, for me, at the heart of fundraising today. Which is, either fundraising matters for its own sake – it’s what you do with the money that counts. Or that fundraising is one part of the total activities of your organisation, all of which should contribute towards the mission.

I don’t have an easy answer for you. What I do know is this – the raffle appeals we produce for WSPA lead with the cause. The message is one about animal cruelty and what you can do to stop it. The mechanic is a book of raffle tickets. Smashes its targets every time. So maybe you can have your income cake and eat it.

Direct Marketing | Fundraising