Sold Out Before the Ball Began: 1,000 Tickets, 150 Buyers, $20,900
Giant Steps Melbourne is a school with an unusual funding problem. It opened in Kew in 2016 to bring intensive, best-practice autism education to Melbourne, and the gap between what government funding covers and what that education costs is millions of dollars a year. Its biggest lever for closing the gap is the annual Giant Steps Melbourne Ball — in 2026, a decade-of-impact celebration at Centrepiece at Melbourne Park, sold out well in advance.
The Ball’s raffle told a story of its own. It sold all 1,000 tickets — $20,900 — and it did it before the event began: the raffle sold out and was drawn on a Saturday night a fortnight ahead of the Ball itself.
150 buyers is not a small result
Those 1,000 tickets went to just 150 buyers, at an average of $136 per order.
Most fundraising raffles are volume plays. The median ticket across raffles we see is $10, and a typical campaign chases hundreds of small orders through school gates and social feeds. Giant Steps priced the other way: $50 for a single ticket, softened by packs of five for $100 and ten for $200. The packs did the work — nearly everyone bought in bundles, and three supporters came back to buy twice.
That pricing only fits an audience that is already invested in the cause. But where it fits, the maths changes completely: raising $20,900 at school-fete prices takes thousands of tickets and hundreds of buyers. Giant Steps needed 150 people, and every one of them was someone the school already knew or was about to host. The effort behind each dollar — the emails sent, the reminders posted, the questions answered — was a fraction of what a volume campaign demands.
Finishing before the night
The other design choice worth noticing is the calendar. The raffle opened at the end of July, ran for just over a week, and closed before the Ball rather than at it.
The final Saturday evening did most of the work — sales accelerated from 5pm, the last tickets went at 9:41pm, and the winners were drawn that same night.
Why close a gala raffle before the gala? Because the night itself was already spoken for. The Ball runs its own fundraising programme — an online auction and a room full of major donors — and a raffle competing for stage time and wallet attention on the night dilutes both. Selling out in advance meant the raffle’s $20,900 was banked before the first course, the winners could be celebrated rather than solicited, and the evening’s asks could focus on the bigger-ticket giving.
There are two clean ways to pair a raffle with an event: sell it in the room on the night, or finish it before the night and let the event celebrate the result. Giant Steps chose the second, and the raffle and the Ball each got a clear run.
The prizes didn’t need to carry it
The prize pool was four lots advertised at $5,430 in total, led by a $3,000 dream destination getaway, with original artwork, a luxury restaurant dinner and a connoisseur’s wine basket behind it. Against $20,900 in sales, that is a lean prize pool by raffle standards — proof that when the cause is the draw, the prizes can support the story rather than be the story. Supporters weren’t buying a shot at a holiday so much as backing a school whose funding gap runs to millions of dollars a year, with a holiday attached.
What to steal
- Price for your actual audience. If your raffle’s buyers are gala guests, alumni or corporate contacts, a $50 ticket with generous packs will outperform a $5 ticket you’d have to sell four thousand times. Only about one in five raffles we see prices at $25 or above; the ones that do are usually pricing for exactly this kind of warm, connected audience.
- Decide where the raffle lives relative to your event — in the room on the night, or finished before it. Giant Steps chose before, and protected the Ball’s own fundraising programme in the process.
- Cap the tickets, and mean it. “1,000 tickets only” gave the campaign real scarcity, the $50 price made the cap believable, and the closing-night rush — most of the raffle’s revenue arrived on its final evening — is what a believable cap produces.
The GSM Ball Raffle ran on RaffleLink and was drawn electronically on the night it sold out. See how a capped, pack-priced raffle works.
