Fundraising: Charity Auctions / Raffles

This article is part of the Festivals For Ukraine Toolkit.

• Creator: Music Saves UA & YOUROPE
• Published in: 2024

Another great fundraising tool available to you is organizing a charity auction or a charity raffle. Among your guests are a lot of devoted music fans who are passionate about your festival and their favourite acts from your line-up. It means that you have a significant number of people who either would be happy to pay a big sum of money to receive a unique item or pay a small amount to get a chance to win it in a raffle. If this money is later used for a charity purpose, it means that these people would be even more interested in participating.
In Ukraine, this is one of the most potent fundraising tools since 2022, with almost every concert or public event featuring a charity auction and every fundraiser featuring a raffle, producing stunning results.

What can you use for a raffle or an auction?
Ideally, you need something unique, symbolic, rare or one-of-a-kind. It can be something of great use, value and interest to people or something that is highly symbolic and sentimental. With festivals, you have 3 ways to source prizes:

Your festival might have a poster of the first edition of your festival, especially signed by artists or the festival team, or a unique piece of site decoration that your fans love which reminds them of your festival. Signs, plushies, banners, posters or any other such artefacts are all great for this. You can make a one-of-a-kind physical ticket for all your future festivals or a group ticket with glamping included. 

Your artists can contribute signed limited records, test presses, various memorabilia, unique items which were used in their music videos, guitar picks, drumsticks, old instruments, accessories, and clothing. A meet’n’greet or an autograph can also be used to hold a raffle. You can create a special poster for each headliner and ask them to sign or have them sign your main festival poster. You can do a raffle / auction before their performance for an opportunity to sing a song on stage with the artists.

Your sponsors can contribute all kinds of things, depending on what their brand and speciality are. These can be goodie bags with merchandise, an unlimited ticket for drinks or meals during the festival or any kind of gift like a phone or a bike. Make sure to reinforce the idea that this will be good for their brand since people will be excited to participate, and in the end, it will end up being a charity donation.

A great example was set by Les Eurockéennes. In 2023, the festival welcomed the Music Saves Ukraine team and eventually introduced us to Joe Duplantier from Gojira, who is a strong supporter of Ukraine. Joe decided to present us with his personal signed guitar, model Charvel “Joe Duplantier” Pro-mod Sam Dimas Style 2 HH Mahogany and a decision was made to run a charity auction to raise money for Music Saves Ukraine by selling it. The festival contacted a local auction house, Dufreche, to set up an auction, and all sides involved heavily promoted it to make sure fans of the band will not miss such an opportunity. As a result, the guitar was sold for €3250.
The festival also raised money that year by letting Music Saves Ukraine sell festival posters signed by artists for donations. 

The collaboration with Music Saves Ukraine was born from a meeting with Vlad at Eurosonic in 2023. In addition to an information stand, sale of UA goodies, the idea was also to involve the scheduled artists. INDOCHINE, POMME and ORELSAN agreed to sign in advance between 50 and 100 posters which were all sold on the Music Saves Ukraine stand, the Ukrainian group JINJER came to sign the posters on the stand. And GOJIRA even offered a signed guitar that we auctioned off after the festival! The total amount raised was closed to €7K.
Kem Lalot  / Les Eurockéennes de Belfort

If you are going with a raffle, here are some things to consider:

• How many prize pools? If you have more than one item for the raffle, consider what is better – making one prize pool with a higher price to enter or making multiple prize pools with a lower price, giving people higher chances of winning particular items and letting them enter multiple times, raising how much an average person will donate
• How many raffles? Think whether you should hold the raffle once or one on each day of the festival. If you do it once – people will try their best not to miss it, and it is easier to promote it. On the other hand, if you have enough prizes to do a raffle each day, it will ensure that everyone gets a chance to participate, even the one-day visitors.
• Balance your entry price – the price of participation should be low enough to ensure people do not think twice before they enter, but not so low that you are missing out on an opportunity to raise more.