June 30, 2022 ––– TO ALL BCCF CHOIRS

With the past season being one in which some choirs only met intermittently, and some were still on hiatus, we decided to follow last year’s pattern and hold the BCCF Raffle in the fall.

Here is the information you need for your choir to be part of it.  It’s a tried and tested way for choirs to raise at least $600 with relatively little effort from your singers.  We have been organizing this project every year since 1988 and are happy that it is still so popular with our members. We know that your Board may not be meeting regularly, so we’re giving you extra time to make contact with them (those Zoom meetings are pretty easy!) and get the contract back to us by August 1.

Once again the prizes are COOL CASH – which makes the tickets very easy to sell.  In our Raffle 2021, 21 choirs took part.  There were 13 prizes, ranging from $100 to $2,000.  No matter how many choirs participate, the pot of gold stays strictly in proportion to the number of tickets printed and the odds will always be attractive.  We will go ahead with the project as long as we have a minimum of 20 choirs. The more tickets we contract to sell, the more we can put in the prize pot. 

As last year, we are running this through Raffle Nexus, which means that you will very easily be able to sell your raffle tickets online – in fact many of last year’s choirs found it proved to be much easier than selling hard-copy tickets. For the raffle coordinators, much of the tracking can be done online, there is minimal handling of money, and help is always available from the BCCF to answer questions. Once we have the Raffle license, you will be asked to define how many tickets to allocate to e-sales and how many to hard-copy. There is some flexibility – as you sell, you may find the e-tickets going faster than the paper ones, or vice versa, and we can re-allocate as needed.

Here’s the change, though it needn’t affect the totals if you’ve done this before. Tickets this year are $5 each, and your choir gets $3 (60%) of that; so if you sell 200 tickets, you will receive $600 to pay for music, instruments, or professional fees.  Out of the $2 the BCCF keeps from each ticket, we pay all prizes and expenses.  We will probably offer a limited number of $20 special deal packets – 5 tickets for the price of 4. (This is in contrast to previous years where we asked you to sell 500 tickets at $2 each).  Because we’re working with RaffleNexus, our expenses are a bit higher, but we hope there will be a little left over for other BCCF projects. It works out well for us all. If you don’t think you can sell 200 tickets, you can contact Brigid Coult, Project Manager, to negotiate a smaller number.  A reminder: your choir membership needs to be current to allow you to participate in the Raffle.

The choirs which do best at this find just ONE well-organized person to be in charge and they get their singers to promise to sell (or even buy for themselves) 10 or more tickets each.  Beware of well-meaning but unrealistic offers to take more – unsold or lost tickets will eat into your share of the proceeds.  We plan to have the tickets available to you by early-September so that you will have about eight weeks until November 21/2022 for your campaign. The winners will be drawn on November 24.

If your singers do return unsold tickets, consider buying them for your choir with choir funds.  This is quite legal and several choirs have actually won prizes!  It will cost you nothing in effect because $2 from each ticket would have been due to the BCCF anyway and the other $3 will be returned to you as part of your share.

Please consider this fundraising opportunity carefully.  We know it can actually be quite enjoyable if you find the right person (or team) to keep careful records and nag graciously!

Here’s the change, though it needn’t affect the totals if you’ve done this before. Tickets this year are $5 each, and your choir gets $3 (60%) of that; so if you sell 200 tickets, you will receive $600 to pay for music, instruments, or professional fees.  Out of the $2 the BCCF keeps from each ticket, we pay all prizes and expenses.  We will probably offer a limited number of $20 special deal packets – 5 tickets for the price of 4. (This is in contrast to previous years where we asked you to sell 500 tickets at $2 each).  Because we’re working with RaffleNexus, our expenses are a bit higher, but we hope there will be a little left over for other BCCF projects. It works out well for us all. If you don’t think you can sell 200 tickets, you can contact Brigid Coult, Project Manager, to negotiate a smaller number.  A reminder: your choir membership needs to be current to allow you to participate in the Raffle.

The choirs which do best at this find just ONE well-organized person to be in charge and they get their singers to promise to sell (or even buy for themselves) 10 or more tickets each.  Beware of well-meaning but unrealistic offers to take more – unsold or lost tickets will eat into your share of the proceeds.  We plan to have the tickets available to you by early-September so that you will have about eight weeks until November 21/2022 for your campaign. The winners will be drawn on November 24.

If your singers do return unsold tickets, consider buying them for your choir with choir funds.  This is quite legal and several choirs have actually won prizes!  It will cost you nothing in effect because $2 from each ticket would have been due to the BCCF anyway and the other $3 will be returned to you as part of your share.

Please consider this fundraising opportunity carefully.  We know it can actually be quite enjoyable if you find the right person (or team) to keep careful records and nag graciously!

We’ll be watching for your completed contract by August 1, 2022. GOOD LUCK!

Willi Zwozdesky
Executive Director