We were pleased to hear from Raffle Box founder Matthew Broussard and IT and Sales VP, Simon Cusack. They have helped us to organize and run two of our online fifty-fifty fundraising events. Raffle Box provides an online platform that allows small groups to more easily fundraise using a fifty-fifty raffle. They were inspired to start doing this when they saw how much funding can be raised this way by very large groups like the Calgary Stampede or the Edmonton Oilers. They are a Calgary based tech company with a small staff of twelve enthusiastic people. They are Alberta and Maritimes based for now but are planning to expand nation-wide by next year. They have found that the COVID pandemic has forced a shift to online fundraising for a lot of groups. They are currently running three hundred raffles per month and raising about four million dollars per month in total. They are licensed by the gaming commissions in the provinces where they run raffles. They help their customers by handling the technical end of things, providing an online platform where their customers can share links as well as doing marketing and advertising or them. Customers pay a fee based on a percentage of the funds raised.
Their customers range from minor and junior hockey teams to volunteer fire departments to rotary groups to the United Way. Keeping up with all the varying regulations in different locations where their raffles are run is a challenge. They work with government agencies in trying to unify the regulations from province to province. They hope that in future things will become more uniform so that groups across the country will be able to raise funds on a more level playing field. We would like to thank both Matthew and Simon for their presentation. This company has been a great help to us in fundraising for several charities and we look forward to using them again in the future.