How The Brisbane Dinner Raffle Raised $40,600 in a Single Night
On a Tuesday night in August, the Brisbane Broncos and the Brisbane Lions put their rivalries aside and filled a room at The Star Brisbane. The Brisbane Dinner brought the two clubs’ communities together for one cause: supporting Queenslanders living with Motor Neurone Disease, through the MND & Me Foundation.
The night included a raffle. It opened that afternoon, closed at 9:45pm, and raised $40,600 from 620 buyers across 38 prizes. Winners were drawn electronically at 9:49pm, four minutes after the last ticket sold. From first sale to draw, the whole raffle fit inside seven hours.
What makes it worth studying is how those tickets were sold. There were no ticket books, no card terminals, and almost no cash. The raffle ran on two channels at once, and the split tells a story:
| How tickets were bought | Orders | Raised |
|---|---|---|
| A volunteer’s phone, guest taps their card | 387 | $24,750 |
| The guest’s own phone, mostly via QR code | 257 | $15,200 |
| Cash, logged at the booth | 10 | $650 |
Volunteers sold 61% of the raffle with nothing but their phones
The biggest channel of the night was Tap to Pay: volunteers moving through the room with the RaffleLink Ticket Booth app on their own phones. A guest chooses their tickets, taps their card or watch on the back of the volunteer’s phone, and the tickets arrive by email before the volunteer reaches the next table. No card reader, no terminal hire, no float to count at midnight.
That channel alone took $24,750 — 387 sales, the biggest single night of in-person selling we’ve seen on the platform.
The rest of the room bought without being asked. A QR code on the tables and screens let guests buy quietly from their seats, and 257 of them did, for $15,200.
Why you want both channels, not one
It’s tempting to treat the QR code as the modern option and the roving seller as the old-fashioned one. The night’s data says otherwise: the two channels reach different people.
A volunteer converts the guest who came to give but hadn’t thought about the raffle — the one who says yes because someone friendly asked. The QR code converts the guest who prefers to decide privately, reading the prize list over dessert. Drop either channel and you lose that half of the room.
And the choice isn’t about order size. The average sale was $63.95 through volunteers and $60.48 through the QR code — almost identical. Face-to-face selling didn’t produce bigger orders. It produced more orders, from people the QR code would never have reached.
The two channels also rose and fell together across the night. Sales built steadily from 6pm, and the biggest hour was 8pm to 9pm — $16,325 across both channels — which lines up with the point in any dinner when the stage holds the room’s attention. A raffle announcement from the MC, with a draw time attached, is the best promotion an event raffle ever gets.
Cash, for the record, was ten sales and $650. Worth accepting when a guest insists; not worth building the night around.
Priced for the room
Tickets were $25 each or two for $50 — well above the $10 median ticket price we see across raffles. That’s the right call for a gala: the room has already dressed up and committed its evening to the cause, and a prize pool of 38 lots advertised at $16,812 means nearly everyone knows someone who won something. The average order on the night was $62.
What another organisation can copy
Strip away the football clubs and the ballroom, and the setup is simple:
- Turn on the Ticket Booth and have volunteers log in on their own phones before the doors open.
- Put the QR code everywhere — table settings, screens, the programme.
- Give the raffle a deadline from the stage, and draw the winners before the night ends, while the room is still there to hear it.
The Brisbane Dinner had two famous clubs and a room full of their supporters, and most fundraisers don’t. But every organisation that puts people in a room — a trivia night, a season launch, a school gala — has the same opportunity: for a few hours, your most generous audience is all in one place. This is how you let all of them buy a ticket.
The Brisbane Dinner Raffle ran on RaffleLink. Volunteers took contactless payments through the free RaffleLink Ticket Booth app, and winners were drawn electronically on the night. See how in-person selling works.
