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HankLloydRight
No Roads
I suspect it won't be that common. First, with the exception of Tesla, raffle sponsors that raffle off cars usually get the cars donated from a dealership. The dealership gets a tax break. Terms vary from raffle to raffle and dealership to dealership, but sometimes the dealer is getting rid of an inventory car, other times the winner has flexibility to trade for another car. Sometimes the raffle sponsor has to pay for the car right away but usually not. And the dealer often gets "free advertising" as the raffle sponsor moves the car from place to place to attract attention.
Tesla is an exception: anybody raffling a Tesla is probably paying Tesla for the car or has somehow managed to line up deep-pocketed donors to pay for the car. Either way you slice it, raffling off a Tesla adds a big expense to the raffle's bottom line OR money that donors could have been giving for another purpose gets hoovered into the Tesla maw.
So a Tesla raffle is an expensive raffle from the sponsor's perspective, from the get-go.
Then, the sponsoring organization incurs a lot of extra cost when it decides to "pay for the taxes" (as you know, subject to a lot of details in the raffle rules) and in our case, also pick up fees like doc & delivery fee. It's a huge swing between (using the Climate XChange raffle as an example) having the Winner shell out $27K up front for US withholding taxes versus CXC kicking in $36,730 for the US and $5K towards state taxes. Even more money out of the pocket of the raffle sponsor.
So why the heck would Climate XChange do this? Shouldn't we just do the cheapest thing and pocket all the bucks, for a cause we believe in passionately? Sure, in some cases. But not this case. Our top priority is ATTENTION. Attention for carbon pricing in general; attention for Senator Mike Barrett's revenue-neutral carbon-fee-and-dividend legislation in Massachusetts in particular (see https://malegislature.gov/Bills/189/Senate/S1747, you didn't really think I was going to pass up this opportunity, did you?). The time is right; the discussion has been gaining momentum; the UN climate conference in Paris was raising everybody's consciousness. As long as the raffle meets this primary objective, then basically we're spending the dollars we MIGHT have gained from cheaping out on the raffle on the right thing, building momentum & attention. For that matter, the dollars we spend on advertising also work to this advantage! About the only expense I can point to that I'm not fond of and can't argue advances the fight-climate-change-via-carbon-pricing cause is the MA raffle tax of 5% of gross.
By the way, I disclose all of this on the raffle website, so I'm not revealing any secret I haven't already revealed. I'm just putting it out there in a slightly more convenient form.
Alan
P.S. Plus, of course, I just plain hate a few of the things associated with raffles in general, such as hitting the "winner" with an ugly tax bill. And cash raffles. Boy, do I hate a cash raffle.
And because I adore Tesla, I desperately want to put someone else into one. It gives me tremendous pleasure to see people working on configs, speculating what they might do if they win! And some people talking about how they couldn't afford a Tesla any other way. If I do another raffle, I'm gonna treat this raffle as my "starter raffle" and figure out how to go up another level. I live to make attorneys' heads explode!
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Boy did you hit a nerve with that question... I walk into Taylor Rental today, look at their raffle drums, and as I look, and as I think, I slowly realize that my "Plan A" for the raffle drawing is completely, totally and irrevocably f*cked.
You may know that I've been working with a graphic designer / web designer since July. She has produced a beautiful ticket, even if I do say so myself. We deliver it electronically, primarily, but can also print it out for people who are local. (Remember, illegal to mail it.) It's 8.5" X 11". No namby-pamby little red raffle sliver o' paper here. I went through I-don't-know-how-many samples of paper and card stock, gotta be over 50, and actually printed on 15, until I found the best. I use a Canon MG7520 home inkjet plus Epson Ultra Premium Photo Paper Glossy to produce an awesome ticket that feels good when you handle it and looks good as well. We hand-perforate the stock using a Carl heavy duty rotary paper trimmer at just the right level of pressure so that the paper can be fed through the printer, held and admired, and then the ticket (top) can be separated from the stub (bottom) with a simple and easily repeatable fold and slight tug. Then the stub comes back to us and the ticket stays with the purchaser.
For folks not picking up a physical ticket, only the electronic ticket, the plan was to print out their stubs for them.
Then, we take all the stubs, stick them in white envelopes so that no one has any idea which ticket is which, stick them all in a large drum, spin the drum, and pick!
Yeah.... no.
The drums aren't large enough. Each stub is 8.5 X 5.5. It's a goddamned awesome stub because I just couldn't settle for less.
But "over 1300" stubs (we're gonna hafta update the website later today) even WITHOUT their envelopes is a lot of stubs. Taking up a lot of space. They wouldn't even have FIT into the drums I saw this morning.
Jessica, my oldest son Brian, and I, actually marched out in the finally-getting-colder Boston December afternoon to inspect and argue over using a compost barrel for the stubs. But we couldn't convince ourselves that even a compost barrel would do it, especially in terms of letting the tickets loaded first, into the bottom, circulate and have a good shot at being picked. (To be fair, it was only me arguing. Brian just stared at me. Jessica immediately told me I was "insane". Tough crowd.)
So now we're on to Plan B. A traditional raffle drum, brass, I forget the exact dimensions. A long roll of the red raffle tickets (OK, these are yellow) that I hate, carefully selected so that the low-order digits nicely match the ticket numbers we're already using, so there's an easy mapping of The One True Ticket Number from the database (also printed on the tickets and stubs) to the pre-printed unique numbers on the differently-beauty-abled yellow tickets. We've already gone through legal review on this change. And tomorrow, er, later today, we'll import a Climate XChange board member who had thought he was going to spend the day running his business to come audit the raffle ticket control sheets and match them all up to the yellow stubs in preparation for Thursday night.
And we ran an experiment today with 2000 tickets to make sure that the drum really would mix the tickets up nicely, so that we don't have to worry that we'll be unfair to someone based on order of loading tickets.
Whew.
Alan
Tesla is an exception: anybody raffling a Tesla is probably paying Tesla for the car or has somehow managed to line up deep-pocketed donors to pay for the car. Either way you slice it, raffling off a Tesla adds a big expense to the raffle's bottom line OR money that donors could have been giving for another purpose gets hoovered into the Tesla maw.
So a Tesla raffle is an expensive raffle from the sponsor's perspective, from the get-go.
Then, the sponsoring organization incurs a lot of extra cost when it decides to "pay for the taxes" (as you know, subject to a lot of details in the raffle rules) and in our case, also pick up fees like doc & delivery fee. It's a huge swing between (using the Climate XChange raffle as an example) having the Winner shell out $27K up front for US withholding taxes versus CXC kicking in $36,730 for the US and $5K towards state taxes. Even more money out of the pocket of the raffle sponsor.
So why the heck would Climate XChange do this? Shouldn't we just do the cheapest thing and pocket all the bucks, for a cause we believe in passionately? Sure, in some cases. But not this case. Our top priority is ATTENTION. Attention for carbon pricing in general; attention for Senator Mike Barrett's revenue-neutral carbon-fee-and-dividend legislation in Massachusetts in particular (see https://malegislature.gov/Bills/189/Senate/S1747, you didn't really think I was going to pass up this opportunity, did you?). The time is right; the discussion has been gaining momentum; the UN climate conference in Paris was raising everybody's consciousness. As long as the raffle meets this primary objective, then basically we're spending the dollars we MIGHT have gained from cheaping out on the raffle on the right thing, building momentum & attention. For that matter, the dollars we spend on advertising also work to this advantage! About the only expense I can point to that I'm not fond of and can't argue advances the fight-climate-change-via-carbon-pricing cause is the MA raffle tax of 5% of gross.
By the way, I disclose all of this on the raffle website, so I'm not revealing any secret I haven't already revealed. I'm just putting it out there in a slightly more convenient form.
Alan
P.S. Plus, of course, I just plain hate a few of the things associated with raffles in general, such as hitting the "winner" with an ugly tax bill. And cash raffles. Boy, do I hate a cash raffle.
And because I adore Tesla, I desperately want to put someone else into one. It gives me tremendous pleasure to see people working on configs, speculating what they might do if they win! And some people talking about how they couldn't afford a Tesla any other way. If I do another raffle, I'm gonna treat this raffle as my "starter raffle" and figure out how to go up another level. I live to make attorneys' heads explode! - - - Updated - - -
Boy did you hit a nerve with that question... I walk into Taylor Rental today, look at their raffle drums, and as I look, and as I think, I slowly realize that my "Plan A" for the raffle drawing is completely, totally and irrevocably f*cked.
You may know that I've been working with a graphic designer / web designer since July. She has produced a beautiful ticket, even if I do say so myself. We deliver it electronically, primarily, but can also print it out for people who are local. (Remember, illegal to mail it.) It's 8.5" X 11". No namby-pamby little red raffle sliver o' paper here. I went through I-don't-know-how-many samples of paper and card stock, gotta be over 50, and actually printed on 15, until I found the best. I use a Canon MG7520 home inkjet plus Epson Ultra Premium Photo Paper Glossy to produce an awesome ticket that feels good when you handle it and looks good as well. We hand-perforate the stock using a Carl heavy duty rotary paper trimmer at just the right level of pressure so that the paper can be fed through the printer, held and admired, and then the ticket (top) can be separated from the stub (bottom) with a simple and easily repeatable fold and slight tug. Then the stub comes back to us and the ticket stays with the purchaser.
For folks not picking up a physical ticket, only the electronic ticket, the plan was to print out their stubs for them.
Then, we take all the stubs, stick them in white envelopes so that no one has any idea which ticket is which, stick them all in a large drum, spin the drum, and pick!
Yeah.... no.
The drums aren't large enough. Each stub is 8.5 X 5.5. It's a goddamned awesome stub because I just couldn't settle for less.
But "over 1300" stubs (we're gonna hafta update the website later today) even WITHOUT their envelopes is a lot of stubs. Taking up a lot of space. They wouldn't even have FIT into the drums I saw this morning.
Jessica, my oldest son Brian, and I, actually marched out in the finally-getting-colder Boston December afternoon to inspect and argue over using a compost barrel for the stubs. But we couldn't convince ourselves that even a compost barrel would do it, especially in terms of letting the tickets loaded first, into the bottom, circulate and have a good shot at being picked. (To be fair, it was only me arguing. Brian just stared at me. Jessica immediately told me I was "insane". Tough crowd.)
So now we're on to Plan B. A traditional raffle drum, brass, I forget the exact dimensions. A long roll of the red raffle tickets (OK, these are yellow) that I hate, carefully selected so that the low-order digits nicely match the ticket numbers we're already using, so there's an easy mapping of The One True Ticket Number from the database (also printed on the tickets and stubs) to the pre-printed unique numbers on the differently-beauty-abled yellow tickets. We've already gone through legal review on this change. And tomorrow, er, later today, we'll import a Climate XChange board member who had thought he was going to spend the day running his business to come audit the raffle ticket control sheets and match them all up to the yellow stubs in preparation for Thursday night.
And we ran an experiment today with 2000 tickets to make sure that the drum really would mix the tickets up nicely, so that we don't have to worry that we'll be unfair to someone based on order of loading tickets.
Whew.
Alan
McHoffa
CyberOwners
HankLloydRight
No Roads
Alan, thanks for the detailed answer (as always)!!!
Just one word of warning -- another car group I'm a part of has a very similar tin/copper raffle ticket drum, and very often those kinds of raffle tickets get stuck in the seams on the inside of the drum when turning it, and also sometimes tickets just fall out of the door seams!! So please be careful to make sure all tickets get a fair spin and aren't stuck in the door or a metal seam. thanks!
Ah the bittersweet knowledge that as my odds of winning decrease, funds for saving the world increase.
So be it :smile::smile::biggrin:
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But statistically, speaking, does it matter? All tickets have the same probability of getting stuck in the seams, and any individual is as likely to get improved odds of being picked as getting eliminated from getting picked, so Alan, you are amazing in thinking through this whole thing so beautifully, and please don't let "sweating the small stuff" keep you from really having fun. Do what you can and what you want, but set a good example for us recovering perfectionists and please let the rest go. Can't wait to "meet" you on the live stream!
HankLloydRight
No Roads
Yes, all tickets are at equal odds of getting stuck in a seam and being eliminated from being drawn. That changes the odds, since now there are two "drawings" -- one getting stuck (eliminated) and the main pull. And I'm sorry, this isn't "small stuff". What if it's your ticket that got stuck in a seam?
bollar
Disgruntled Member
There is a reason you suggested random.org, right? That's who I use as well.
HankLloydRight
No Roads
I haven't run any real raffles, but I see random.org being used in a lot of contests, raffles, and door prize awards. It's pretty hard to argue with a set of random numbers returned by random.org. No "hanging chad".
DNAinaGoodWay
Member
Sample tickets; all will be destroyed. On the live stream, we will be viewing the interior of the drum to make sure that it's empty before we load it with official tickets.
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@shelbri, I very much appreciate what you say and I live for words like that. It's not like I'm getting compensated financially.
That said, this raffle has been VERY revealing to me. Jessica frequently worries that there simply aren't enough people out there who care about global warming / climate change. It's a tough issue for many people to wrap their heads around. It just doesn't have the same visceral bite as, say, refugee problems in Europe. It's an infrastructure problem. And yet, apart from the other goals of this raffle, I have found that there are people everywhere in the USA who care a great deal, and not just in terms of running their credit card through some payment infrastructure. There have been many interesting comments and conversations coming out of this raffle. After the raffle is over, I'm going to have to work with the rest of the CXC crew to reach back out to rafflers and see who might be interested in hooking up with a local group. Maybe a chapter of Citizens Climate Lobby (a national group), or maybe start their own version of CXC (which has been cloned a few times now).
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That's right! Everyone at 100 or less qualified for a "Sig Ticket". First 10 got "Founder's Tickets".
JOKING!
Alan - funny stuff. Yet at the same time quite a well thought out process. Your efforts are simply amazing. Thank you!!
Now - was I the only one to look at the photo Alan attached and try to find your ticket? One was close to mine but not exact.
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@shelbri, I very much appreciate what you say and I live for words like that. It's not like I'm getting compensated financially.
That said, this raffle has been VERY revealing to me. Jessica frequently worries that there simply aren't enough people out there who care about global warming / climate change. It's a tough issue for many people to wrap their heads around. It just doesn't have the same visceral bite as, say, refugee problems in Europe. It's an infrastructure problem. And yet, apart from the other goals of this raffle, I have found that there are people everywhere in the USA who care a great deal, and not just in terms of running their credit card through some payment infrastructure. There have been many interesting comments and conversations coming out of this raffle. After the raffle is over, I'm going to have to work with the rest of the CXC crew to reach back out to rafflers and see who might be interested in hooking up with a local group. Maybe a chapter of Citizens Climate Lobby (a national group), or maybe start their own version of CXC (which has been cloned a few times now).
Alan - funny stuff. Yet at the same time quite a well thought out process. Your efforts are simply amazing. Thank you!!
Now - was I the only one to look at the photo Alan attached and try to find your ticket? One was close to mine but not exact.
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That's right! Everyone at 100 or less qualified for a "Sig Ticket". First 10 got "Founder's Tickets".
JOKING!
Dude, you are so right!
We got the drum yesterday after the awful realization that Plan A involving the 8.5x5.5 stubs wasn't going to work, and we wanted to make sure that Plan B would absolutely work.
So The Boy (he's 31) and I spent a half-hour ripping up an entire roll of raffle tickets, 2000 to be precise, and loading them in to make absolutely sure everything fit. Looked great! We can spin the drum, tickets are getting mixed up like crazy.
But... they get stuck in the seams... and worst of all, sometimes they just fall out! My youngest boy is a natural QA engineer... he's the one who figured out the problems. Just as you say!
So Jessica is taking the drum back today, with the tickets, and she's going to try out all the drums in the place to see if we can find one that's better. Maybe we'll tape the door seams.
We got the drum yesterday after the awful realization that Plan A involving the 8.5x5.5 stubs wasn't going to work, and we wanted to make sure that Plan B would absolutely work.
So The Boy (he's 31) and I spent a half-hour ripping up an entire roll of raffle tickets, 2000 to be precise, and loading them in to make absolutely sure everything fit. Looked great! We can spin the drum, tickets are getting mixed up like crazy.
But... they get stuck in the seams... and worst of all, sometimes they just fall out! My youngest boy is a natural QA engineer... he's the one who figured out the problems. Just as you say!
So Jessica is taking the drum back today, with the tickets, and she's going to try out all the drums in the place to see if we can find one that's better. Maybe we'll tape the door seams.
HankLloydRight
No Roads
I just bought a raffle ticket for a raffle for a local music hall. First prize includes:
Woo hoo!! 24 hours in a Tesla Model S!
Also of note are the terms:
Woo hoo!! 24 hours in a Tesla Model S!
Also of note are the terms:
I have been very pleasantly surprised at how many people are willing to work for the long-term interest of everyone versus a little bit of short-term personal interest. This raffle has actually boosted my spirits!
That said, here's my standard recommendation for all worried about changing odds: simply buy more tickets yourself!
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Oh, I agree.
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Yes, I thought about random.org or an iPhone app or similar.
It's probably because I've been a software engineer for a long time, before my colleagues wised up and devised a dummy source tree for me to check into as often as I wished, that I have no trust in electronics for this problem. How do I know that it's really random? How do I know it hasn't been intercepted? How does someone else know *I* haven't rigged up something, somewhere -- maybe sniffing my own net, intercepting a request for random.org, interposing my own server... No, no, I'm not going with an electronic solution for this go 'round.
We're going old-fashioned: paper, drum. There's a CXC board member down in my dining room right now, working through the control sheets for the first 1400 tickets, matching up the database records against the actual tickets we'll use, marking and setting aside the tickets that were cancelled, etc. Then we'll do a verification round with a different set of eyes. We'll load the drum in front of the live stream. Etc.
My big concern at the moment is the potential leakiness of the drum around the seals. Worst case: we tape.
Tickets getting stuck within the drum can be dealt with by having someone sweep his/her hand around the drum, while on camera.
By the way, I am definitely open to suggestions on this! This is a highly-skilled group, good for problem-solving, critical thinking and suggestions. After the raffle, I'm going go sneak in a problem for folks to solve and come back in a month; the solution to that problem will definitely resolve whether P == NP.
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Don't think I haven't thought of exactly that... or similar... there's a used Colorado lottery machine for $20K on eBay right now...
That said, here's my standard recommendation for all worried about changing odds: simply buy more tickets yourself!
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Oh, I agree.
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Yes, I thought about random.org or an iPhone app or similar.
It's probably because I've been a software engineer for a long time, before my colleagues wised up and devised a dummy source tree for me to check into as often as I wished, that I have no trust in electronics for this problem. How do I know that it's really random? How do I know it hasn't been intercepted? How does someone else know *I* haven't rigged up something, somewhere -- maybe sniffing my own net, intercepting a request for random.org, interposing my own server... No, no, I'm not going with an electronic solution for this go 'round.
We're going old-fashioned: paper, drum. There's a CXC board member down in my dining room right now, working through the control sheets for the first 1400 tickets, matching up the database records against the actual tickets we'll use, marking and setting aside the tickets that were cancelled, etc. Then we'll do a verification round with a different set of eyes. We'll load the drum in front of the live stream. Etc.
My big concern at the moment is the potential leakiness of the drum around the seals. Worst case: we tape.
Tickets getting stuck within the drum can be dealt with by having someone sweep his/her hand around the drum, while on camera.
By the way, I am definitely open to suggestions on this! This is a highly-skilled group, good for problem-solving, critical thinking and suggestions. After the raffle, I'm going go sneak in a problem for folks to solve and come back in a month; the solution to that problem will definitely resolve whether P == NP.
I haven't run any real raffles, but I see random.org being used in a lot of contests, raffles, and door prize awards. It's pretty hard to argue with a set of random numbers returned by random.org. No "hanging chad".
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Don't think I haven't thought of exactly that... or similar... there's a used Colorado lottery machine for $20K on eBay right now...
HankLloydRight
No Roads
So are they (engineers), and they've thought of all those issues also. See: https://www.random.org/draws/ For all of $17, they handle everything, including publishing and storing the results on their site. Also FAQ page here: RANDOM.ORG - Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
They're also on TLS 1.2 HTTPS, so it would take a pretty sophisticated attack (if possible) for someone to spoof your connection to their site.
HankLloydRight
No Roads
But that's different. Those are actual winning lottery numbers and someone on the inside disclosing them.
With Random.org, they don't know (or need to know) who has what actual ticket number. They just provide a package of random numbers or a list of winners. It's up to Alan to assign a meaning to each one and announce the actual winner.
McHoffa
CyberOwners
I've only got a very small chance of winning (which is better than none I supposed) so I'm not getting my hopes up, but watching this thread has been interesting as I'd considered raffling things before. There is a lot to think about!
