More Than Half of This Raffle Was Bought by Supporters Who'd Bought Before
On 2 August, Save A Horse Australia drew its $10,000 Cash Raffle: $43,999 in ticket sales from 1,521 supporters in thirty days.
The number that explains it, though, isn’t the total. It’s this one: 818 of those 1,521 buyers — 54% — had bought a ticket in one of Save A Horse’s previous raffles. Between them, returning supporters contributed 57% of everything raised.
More than half of this raffle was, in effect, sold before it opened.
The raffle
Save A Horse Australia is an ACNC-registered charity that rescues, rehabilitates and rehomes neglected, abused and surrendered horses. Raffles have been part of how they fund that work for years: this was their twentieth on RaffleLink, in an unbroken run stretching back to December 2019 — roughly three a year, every year.
The format was simple and familiar. Tickets at $10, with packs at 2 for $18, 3 for $25 and 5 for $40. Five cash prizes totalling $10,000, led by an $8,000 first prize. One month of sales, drawn the day after close.
Six years of coming back
Because Save A Horse has run raffles with us across both platforms since 2019, we can trace how far back this raffle’s buyers go — matched by email address, so if anything these figures are an undercount (people change addresses; they don’t stop being supporters).
Of the 818 returning buyers:
- 347 first bought a Save A Horse raffle ticket in 2019 or 2020 — still buying six years later
- 406 had bought tickets in five or more of their previous raffles — not one-off repeats, but genuine regulars
- Returning supporters also spent more: $30.95 per order on average, against $26.58 for first-time buyers — about 16% more
That last figure is worth sitting with. A returning supporter isn’t just a cheaper sale than a new one — no advertising had to find them — they’re a bigger sale.
This pattern is not unique to Save A Horse. Across more than a decade of raffle history on our platform, supporters who had bought from an organisation before have contributed close to half of raffle revenue overall. What Save A Horse shows is what that looks like when an organisation works the pattern deliberately: run raffles on a regular rhythm, and each one inherits the audience of the last.
The habits that build the base
Three things stand out in how this raffle was run.
They kept the door open for next time. 789 of this raffle’s buyers — more than half — ticked the box to hear about future raffles. That is next raffle’s opening-week audience, already assembled before this one was even drawn.
They run on a rhythm. Roughly three raffles a year since 2019. A supporter who misses one knows another is coming; nobody has to be re-convinced from scratch.
They let supporters chip in on the fee. With fee assistance switched on, 77% of orders chose to cover the platform fee — well above the platform average of about half — adding a further $1,885 on top of ticket sales. Supporters who have watched an organisation’s work for six years behave like donors, because that’s what they are.
For organisers earlier in the journey, this is the transferable lesson: the list you build this raffle is the result you get next raffle. Collect the opt-in, come back on a schedule, and make returning effortless — supporters with a RaffleLink account have their details remembered, and anyone can follow an organisation to be notified the moment its next raffle goes live. The base you’re building is always in view, too: RaffleLink gathers every consenting supporter across all your raffles into one supporter list, ready to browse or export from your dashboard whenever you’re planning the next one.
Approaching a milestone
This raffle took Save A Horse Australia past $950,000 raised through raffles since 2019 — closing in on the $1 million mark, ten dollars at a time, funding feed, vet work and rehabilitation for horses that had nowhere else to go.
A raffle or two from now, they’ll get there. And if the last twenty are any guide, more than half of it will come from people who’ve already decided to buy.
Save A Horse Australia ran this raffle on RaffleLink.
