Are you ready to try a fundraiser for your PTO that’s a little different than your usual school fundraiser?
A fundraiser that has the potential to make some serious cash for your school group?
Heck yes, you are!
In this post, I’m going to do a deep dive into all of the details you need to know to run a super successful lottery fundraiser.
The great thing about this sort of fundraiser is that it’s very easy to host online, without the need for paper tickets.
And not only does this mean easier set up and management for the Fundraising Chair, but friends and family from outside your local area can easily participate too!
How a Lottery Fundraiser Works
A lottery based fundraiser works like this: People buy a three digit ticket, and if the number is picked in the specific state lottery drawing, they win!
There’s no limit to the number of times they can win since the same number can potentially be drawn more than once during the month.
There are 1,000 different numerical combinations of digits from 000-999, so your group can theoretically sell up to 1,000 tickets.
Check Fundraiser Legalities
Before settling on this fundraising concept, make sure that you’re legally allowed to run this sort of fundraiser in the first place.
You should always stay in compliance with your state’s gaming and non-profit laws (if your PTO is registered as and operates as a non-profit organization).
Here in Ohio, 501(c)(3) non-profit organization are allowed to hold raffle fundraisers, and since this sort of fundraiser is essentially a raffle, Ohio laws permit this type of fundraising.
If you’re not already familiar with your state’s laws and regulations in this area, do a Google search to find out.
Once you know you’re legally compliant, it’s time to get planning!
Pick a Month for Both Selling Tickets and the Drawings
Next, choose a timeframe for your fundraiser, one to sell tickets during and then another in which where the winners will be drawn.
Ideally, pick a month with more days than others for the ticket drawing month because it’s going to give more opportunities to win.
January, March, May, July, August, October, December have the most days with 31 each month, so those provide the greatest number of opportunities to win and ticket purchasers will get the biggest bang for their buck.
You can sell for the entire month before and even into the drawing month too, since there’ll be however many chances to win as there are days remaining in the month.
Pick a Lottery Game
A lottery fundraiser is based on your state’s lottery system.
Here in Ohio, the Lottery Commission oversees several daily lotto drawings, including a mid Day and evening Pick Three.
For the lottery fundraiser I ran, I used the evening Pick Three drawing.
It’s important to specifically list which drawing you’ll base your fundraiser on to eliminate any confusion from your participants.
Be sure to specify which drawing you’ll use in the published rules for the fundraiser.
The drawing you choose will be how winners are chosen.
Check to see if your lottery commission publishes a spreadsheet of the numbers drawn each day.
Ohio has just a spreadsheet available on the lottery website and I was able to compare the list against my list of ticket numbers (more about that in a bit!) to quickly determine winners.
What do the winners actually win?
Not a piece of the state’s lottery pot, but instead the designated prize your PTO determines.
Cash Prizes are Easiest
The easiest prize to offer for a lottery fundraiser is cash.
You want to choose an amount that will leave your group with a profit after paying out all of the prizes.
My group decided to offer different prize amounts depending on the day, just to add in a bit of fun.
Monday through Friday won $50, Saturday winners got $100 and Sunday winners received $150.
It doesn’t take a lot of ticket sales to make for a profitable lottery fundraiser and you can calculate your potential costs by looking at the calendar.
Pricing Tickets
The next part of a profitable fundraiser is setting the price of the tickets in a sweet spot.
We sold one ticket for $5 and 6 for $25.
Give people an incentive to buy more than one ticket by making the tickets slight less expensive when they buy in multiples.
Don’t make the tickets too inexpensive because it’ll not only make for a less profitable fundraiser, but you’ll also be leaving money on the table.
Selling Tickets
The really nice thing about this sort of fundraiser is that because you’re not shipping anything more than a check, you can have friends and family from across the country, and really world, participate.
If you wish to have physical tickets printed, you can do that, but technology makes it no longer a necessary.
You’ll just need a way to track the numbers people choose when they purchase tickets.
Our fundraising platform had space for purchasers to indicate their chosen numbers and in the case of multiple tickets, we asked for the numbers to be separated by commas.
Then twice a day, around noon and again at night, a volunteer entered the numbers purchased that day onto a simple Google Doc list, displaying all chosen numbers in numerical order.
A link to the file was placed on the fundraiser’s home page so potential ticket purchasers could see what numbers had already been chosen.
In the event of people choosing the same numbers and winning, we indicated that the pot would be even split.
Although we had a few numbers chosen by multiple people, none ended up being winning numbers, so it was a non issue in the end.
Distributing Prizes
Instead of handing over cash to the winners, you’ll write checks after the month where winners are determined and either personally deliver to the recipient, or pop in the mail.
It’s easier to manage paying out everything all at once after the end of the month versus day by day or once a week since people might win more than once.
Real world results
My PTO ran this sort of fundraiser in the Spring of 2023 and had lackluster results.
But even though our PTO did not have high participation in this fundraiser, I definitely recommend giving it a try.
It’s one I’ll definitely be repeating because the potential is there.
Our fundraiser had about 10-12 families participating, and we grossed $1200 in ticket sales.
As it turns out, it was enough for our purposes, and I can imagine much better results with just a smidge more participation!
Watch this!
I cover the ins and outs of a lottery fundraiser in this video:
Over to you!
And that’s all that’s involved in running a lottery based fundraiser.
It’s a fresh fundraising concept that can help your group raise lots of money, in a pretty easy way.
Hope you take this idea and run with it with great results!
