How a 35-Year-Old Festival Raised $30,983 Without Buying a Single Prize
Every fundraiser runs into the same problem eventually: prizes cost money, and money spent on prizes is money that never reaches the cause. The usual answers are to chase donations from local businesses, or to accept a thinner margin and buy something with enough pull to sell tickets.
When the Abbey Museum of Art and Archaeology set out to mark the 35th anniversary of the Abbey Medieval Festival, it took a third path — it gave away the festival itself.
The prize pool was the product
Every one of the twelve prizes was an Abbey experience, together advertised at $9,324:
- An Overnight Ottoman Yurt Experience — $3,250
- Two VIP Corporate Box Experiences, Saturday and Sunday — $1,500 each
- A place at the Saturday night “Abbey After Dark 35th Revelry” celebration for four — $1,011
- A ladder of weekend, VIP and general-admission tickets, from $550 down to $147
None of it had to be bought in.
The raffle ran from 7 May to 22 June at $5 a ticket, with discounted packs of four, eight and ten. It sold 6,694 tickets to 1,193 supporters, raising $30,983 in ticket sales, and was drawn on 24 June, a little over a fortnight before the festival opened at Abbeystowe in Caboolture on 10 July.
Then the 2026 festival sold out. Every session. Which meant the prizes the Museum had given away could no longer be bought at any price.
Why this works
A prize you already own converts at full advertised value without having to be paid for first. That is the obvious benefit. The less obvious one matters more: everyone who buys a ticket is, by definition, someone who wants to attend your event.
A donated hamper or a gift card attracts anyone who likes hampers or gift cards. A prize drawn from your own programme attracts your actual audience — people who already care about what you do, and who are worth knowing after the raffle closes.
For a festival, a venue, a gallery, a theatre company or a membership organisation, the prize pool may already be sitting in your own inventory: season passes, behind-the-scenes access, the good seats, the thing nobody can buy on the open market.
Plan two pushes, not one
The Museum’s opening day brought in $6,343 — 20% of the entire campaign. Sales then settled into a slow trickle. On 16 June, more than five weeks in, a second push produced $4,306 in a single day.
Those two days accounted for 34% of everything raised across a 47-day campaign, and the closing week added another 18%. Most raffles are launched hard and then left to drift to the finish. The weeks in between are where a second push pays.
Supporters will often cover the fee
The Museum switched on fee assistance, which lets buyers choose to absorb the platform fee themselves so that more of their ticket price reaches the cause. 340 of 1,254 orders — 27% — took it up, adding $341.57 in fee cover on top of ticket sales.
The raffle also brought in 236 new email subscribers, and 49 supporters came back to buy more than once. A raffle is rarely just a raffle: run well, it is also a list-building exercise and a way of finding out who your most committed supporters actually are.
The takeaway
Prize sourcing is usually treated as a procurement problem — who can we ask, what can we afford. The Abbey Museum treated it as an inventory question instead, and the answer was already on the shelf.
If your organisation runs an event, the best prize you can offer may be a way into it.
The Abbey Museum of Art and Archaeology was among the first organisations to move across to RaffleLink’s new platform, and ran this raffle there.
