@boofagle, funny you should ask... At a Climate XChange board meeting today, a resolution was passed to begin groundwork for another raffle!
It didn't occur to me until just now -- basically because I'm an idiot, and these two posts triggered an actual Thought in the rock that passes for my brain -- but I'd like to ask for some help from this crowd. Basically, some questions/opinions/comments/advice, even though such things are always in short supply here on TMC. NOT.
My most important question is this: what did you view as bad / broken / suboptimal about the last raffle? Boy, do I realize I'm potentially opening myself up to a lot of criticism. :-( Turns out my skin is thinner than I had always imagined; some of the criticism on the last raffle really got to me. But I don't know how to improve without asking for feedback, so I'll just also ask that you try to be gentle.
Here are at least some of the things I want to improve on, in no particular order:
+ I'd like to get an actual, real live auditor. Wasn't able to find one last time who would agree to handle the raffle. If anyone knows a CPA or auditor practicing in MA who might be open to auditing this raffle - processes, prize awards, anything that an auditor thinks should be audited -- please let me know! We went to great lengths last time to be open and fair, we had our attorney involved every step of the way, we had multiple people on the board and in the organization cross-checking each other, and STILL had some people pointing to this issue. And, dammit, despite everything we did to cross-check ourselves, I think it's a reasonable point.
+ Tickets must be formatted in such a way that the tear-off portion is of a small size that can fit with 1999 other tickets into a raffle drum. It was an unpleasant moment when I discovered that the ticket that our designer and I had labored over for so long turned out to be too big for the raffle drum. Too big, even, for 2000 of them (well, 1744 or whatever the exact number turned out to be) to fit into a composting barrel. So I had to invent a lookup table and map the tickets onto a roll of standard carnival-style ticket stubs, which (a) sucked and (b) opened us up to questions -- how do I know you didn't make a mistake on the lookup table? How do I know you didn't put in more stubs? How do I know you put in my stub? Etc., etc. As upsetting as these questions were to me, I have to say that the whole "use a small stub in place of the large stub" thing is sub-optimal. I will NOT be repeating THAT.
+ I'd like to gather some simple demographic data. Who purchases the tickets? (E.g., current Tesla owner, Tesla wannabe-owner, environmentalist, oil-burning-fiend-who-just-wants-a-Tesla, etc.) How did the purchaser hear of us?
+ I'd like to figure out who, if anyone, among ticket purchasers and/or website visitors, would be amenable to hearing from Climate XChange for an actual fund-raising pitch (e.g., a tax-deductible donation). I think this has to be opt-in, as I really dislike the idea that we'd gather a person's email address for use with the raffle ticket and then just hand that address off for a fundraising letter. Seems unfair to me. Others have pointed out that opt-out is more favorable than opt-in but I'm still thinking opt-in. We managed to NOT gather ANY of the demographic or fundraising info as part of the last raffle, and I'm unwilling to use the ticket buyer email list we gathered from the last raffle to send out shotgun fundraising pitches.
+ I'm thinking it *IS* OK to use last year's ticket buyer email list for a letter letting those people know that we're doing another raffle. I'd be particularly interested in feedback saying NO, this is a BAD idea, and explaining why.
+ I was bad at consistently thanking all the people who helped with this raffle, and there were a ton of them. People on this thread, people at various blogs/publications, vendors, colleagues, and so on. This whole thing would have cratered badly without the many people of goodwill who pitched in! I hope I thanked all who helped but continue to fear that I missed people. I also got over-social-media'd -- I'm basically an introvert by nature -- and after New Year's Eve, just sort of collapsed in a puddle of can't-handle-more-FaceBook or Twitter or reddit or TMC or teslamotors.com or blah blah blah. How do I get better at tracking who to thank, and actually thanking them, and KNOWING that I have thanked them (since I forget)? How do I get better at being a partner on social media?
+ There is no way in hell I'm writing another set of raffle rules with exceptions around certain numbers of tickets. These were things like, if the raffle sells less than 867 tickets, it will be a cash raffle but above 867 full prizes will be awarded. I never thought we'd need those exceptions, and wrote them in because long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far, away, I had a professional identity vaguely resembling that of an engineer. Except that Jar Jar Binks was a better engineer than I was. Anyway, those stupid exceptions became sticking points for some potential ticket buyers because no one (including me) has any interest in a cash raffle. Blech! So this time around, I will find prize guarantors up front -- people who will sign a pledge that they will cover some or all of the prize pool in the event that the raffle doesn't sell enough tickets. Literally, if the raffle were only to sell 1 ticket, the full prizes would still be awarded. Well, N tickets for N prizes, but you get the idea. I think this is a reasonably low risk for a guarantor to take.
I'm also going to be looking for outright donors to cover the prize pool. The pitch is basically this: you contribute $X. We put it to work for the raffle prize pool, and the raffle net will be more than you put in. We'll probably net 2-3X. This is exceptionally good from a donor perspective. We're still discussing whether the raffle is going to be done via the CXC 501c3 or the c4, which means that if it's the c3 we can't spend much of the raffle funds on political lobbying BUT donations are tax-deductible and if it's the c4 we can spend as much as we want on lobbying BUT donations are NOT tax-deductible. Whaddya think? Good idea? Bad idea?
Oh, another thing we're gonna fix: the live streaming!!! If we do another New Year's Eve Drawing, we MUST have a rock solid live stream. Oh man, the pain we caused to our viewers when that damn live stream stopped going out... turned out that the entire stream was captured and saved and was viewable later New Year's Day (and still is), but I still shudder when I think of people who bought their tickets and tuned in and saw a nice, stable, and very boring picture for three hours and then the picture vanished as we were getting to the drawing. Ouch!!!
Prizes... I'm still inclined to do 5 or 6 prizes, but I'm thinking that 2nd through 6th prizes will be CASH ONLY this time around. Last time, I spent an ungodly amount of time assembling carbon-friendly prizes: electric bikes @ $5K, outdoor care kit @ $whatever, indoor care kit, 24 hour Tesla experience, etc. Every Non-Grand Prize Winner Took The Cash. I'm interested whether anyone thinks there really should be an effort made to put together serious non-cash prizes. I think people appreciated the possibility of winning multiple prizes, and the winners certainly didn't complain.
By the way, did anyone else notice that a certain other raffle out there apparently noticed and responded to the CXC raffle? That raffle suddenly introduced a tax payment along with their Grand Prize (cool!). But they switched from awarding a Tesla to awarding (if I recall correctly) a much cheaper Jeep Grand Cherokee (boo! boo, boo, boo!), probably to keep their total prize payout the same.
@CatB - you raise an interesting point! Now, this CXC thing is an MA-based raffle. So basically it happens in an MA legal framework and the drawing must be in MA. I'm thinking that there will be some kind of launch event there as well. But what would stop us from also having an event in MD? Maybe I need to add an MD attorney along with my MA attorney.
Of course, I can't be in two places at once, so maybe that means just an MA launch event. Hmmm. Thoughts?
By the way, I think I'm only going to do this second CXC raffle and then one other (probably not for CXC). The other one will be a little further out in time, but if I'm able to have my way with it, will make this one and the first one look like training wheels. Then I'll officially be out of the raffle-fundraising-for-carbon-pricing business!
So... anyone who still is paying attention to this thread... what else would you have me fix? Or consider? What advice would you give me?
Thanks!
Alan
