Running a hospice lottery: a practical guide
A weekly lottery is one of the steadiest ways a hospice can raise money. Supporters pay a small amount each week or month, someone wins every draw, and the hospice receives regular income it can plan around. This guide covers how a hospice lottery works day to day, and what to get right from the start.
How a hospice lottery works
Most hospice lotteries follow the same pattern:
Players sign up for one or more chances, usually at £1 a chance per week, and pay by Direct Debit, standing order or card.
A draw takes place every week, often on the same day, with a fixed set of prizes and sometimes a rollover.
Winners are told and paid, usually by cheque or bank transfer, with a letter to go with it.
The money left after prizes and costs goes to the hospice. By law, at least 20% of the proceeds of every lottery must go to the good cause; well-run lotteries pass on far more.
Alongside the weekly draw, many hospices run raffles and superdraws a few times a year to reach supporters who prefer a one-off ticket.
Finding and keeping players
New players mostly come from door-to-door and face-to-face canvassing, events, the hospice's own shops and website, and supporters telling friends. Each route needs its own way of getting sign-ups recorded quickly and accurately.
Keeping players matters as much as finding them. A player who stays for years is worth far more than one who leaves after a few months, so it pays to:
send a welcome pack as soon as someone joins;
write to winners promptly;
follow up failed payments politely and quickly;
offer an easy way to change how many chances someone has.
Pattern pricing can help here. Instead of asking for a number of entries, you offer a monthly amount, with bonus chances as a thank-you. Hospiscare in Exeter found their canvassers made an easier sale this way, because they were offering an amount to pay rather than a number of entries.
Collecting payments
Payments are where most of the day-to-day work sits. Every week the lottery office has to match bank, Direct Debit, standing order and card payments to the right players, deal with payments that don't match, and make sure only paid-up players are entered into the draw.
Done by hand, this takes hours and is easy to get wrong. A lottery system that imports the bank and Direct Debit files and matches each payment to the right player turns it into a few minutes' work, and keeps a record of every payment for later questions.
Running fair draws
Every draw should be fair and be seen to be fair. That means:
only eligible, paid-up chances are entered;
the winning numbers are chosen at random;
the result, the entries and the winners are stored, so you can show later exactly how each draw was done.
If you run rollovers, raffles or superdraws as well, the same rules apply to each of them.
Staying within the rules
A hospice lottery is a society lottery under the Gambling Act 2005. Small lotteries are registered with the local council; larger ones need an operating licence from the Gambling Commission. A lottery counts as large once a single lottery's proceeds could exceed £20,000, or once your lotteries in a calendar year could exceed £250,000. Most established hospice weekly lotteries are large lotteries.
With a licence come responsibilities, including:
age checks;
self-exclusion for players who ask to stop;
limits on how much one person can play;
records of consent for marketing;
regular returns to the Commission.
Our guide to Gambling Commission returns for society lotteries explains the returns in more detail.
Where Combase fits
Combase Cloud is lottery software built for UK hospices and charities. It covers the whole weekly cycle in one secure place:
Players: sign-ups and changes to chances.
Payments: imports matched to the right player.
Draws: fair, fully recorded draws.
Letters: welcome packs and winner letters from your own Word templates.
Compliance: the checks and figures the Gambling Commission expects.
See all features or how compliance is built in. It is free for lotteries with fewer than 200 players, and larger lotteries get a clear quote; see pricing.
Thinking about starting or moving a hospice lottery? Book a free demo and we'll show you how it works with sample data.
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