A new raffle platform recently launched online with the aim of supporting a local food bank by enticing donors through coveted bottles of beer, bourbon and mead. The hope of its creators is that it will pave the way for other charities to raise funds in a similar fashion down the road.
Raffles for Hope went live June 24 at raffles4hope.com, featuring the likes of hard-to-get variants of 3 Floyds’ Dark Lord imperial stout and rare bottles of Pappy Van Winkle bourbon.
Ira Jay Williams, of Monee, who serves as director of procurement for the New Lenox-based Illinois Partners in Hope, said the idea was formed after people in the beer industry came together to raise money for employees being laid off during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“They came up with a great concept,” Williams said. “They were raffling off donated bottles of beer. There are numerous other bourbon raffles out there. They’re all over the country, but nothing on this scale. We combined those ideas and went all in.”
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Going “all in” meant taking on two hefty challenges at one time. The first was amassing an attention-getting collection of alcohol, a process that started “a little over a year ago,” according to Williams. A small portion of it was donated, but most of it was purchased.
“That is networking like you wouldn’t believe in the beer and bourbon community as well as the mead community,” Williams said.
The second part was developing a platform for the online raffles, which Williams said was necessary because most existing services are geared more toward auctions.
“With auctions, there is ultimately one winner,” Williams said. “That winner is whoever has the most money. I despise this concept. Once again the wealthy can buy whatever they want — just keep throwing money at it until they win. With raffles, the barrier to entry becomes substantially less.”
June 24 was something of a “soft launch” to make sure the platform, which they developed in a way to keep costs low, worked the way Illinois Partners in Hope planned. The organization then went full speed ahead with it July 1, with the initial raffles running until Aug. 14. People can purchase raffle tickets for $1 apiece for a chance at any of the baskets, but a minimum of 10 entries are required per transaction because of fees.
Williams said the organization had to do something like this to support the work it does. Many food pantries in the area do not have the capability to warehouse goods on a larger scale, so the food bank at Illinois Partners in Hope does that and disperses the food as needed. Last year, Williams said they moved more than 10 million pounds of food.
“All the food that we received is free, but we have to pay to get it here,” Williams said.
Will County has helped the organization, “especially with all the CARES (Act) money that has been floating around,” Williams said. That included helping the organization buy a refrigerated trailer. But costs continue to rise, putting a strain on Illinois Partners in Hope’s limited funding.
“Our logistics budget last year exploded, and we only see it getting bigger,” Williams said. “We can no longer sustain the cost of running the food bank ourselves. It’s just gotten out of hand. It’s just growing at an exponential rate we can’t rein in ourselves.
“We heavily relied on local donors — literally friends who run local businesses in the area — but you can’t keep going back to the same well. So we decided we’d start raising funds, and this was the first idea.”
The hope is that the raffle will raise $500,000.
“I don’t know that it’s necessarily the dollar amount so much as it is the software works,” Williams said. “If the software works, the endgame is hundreds if not thousands of other organizations using the platform. … It will be a platform for literally everyone.”
The concept of raffles has been around for years, but Williams said the platform is designed to help charities reach larger audiences online to fund their missions and break free from the cycle of hitting up the same donors at the same events year after year.
Williams said Illinois Partners in Hope would like to hold two or three raffles per year in-house to support its efforts and ambitions to address hunger in a meaningful way in the area. Beyond those, Williams hopes other organizations utilize the platform.
Raffles for Hope would vet them to make sure they are worthwhile but otherwise allow them to raise funds on the site, taking a percentage to cover processing and operational fees, staff assistance, vetting, and marketing, as well as to support Illinois Partners in Hope.
Bill Jones is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.