Donations Are Live: For Supporters Who Want to Give More Than a Ticket
Your most committed supporters rarely stop at a ticket. They buy their five tickets, then ask how else they can help. The parent who’d happily give the school another $50. The club member who wants the new change rooms built more than they want the meat tray. The local business owner who’d rather put $200 straight into the cause.
Until now the only thing we could offer any of them was more raffle tickets. As of this month there’s a better answer. Supporters can give your organisation a donation, right beside the tickets on your raffle page. They can give on top of the tickets they’ve bought, or give without buying a ticket at all.
There’s a second reason it matters. A raffle ticket is never tax-deductible, because the buyer gets a chance to win something in return. A donation to a Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR) is. So a supporter who wants to give more is better off giving it as a donation, and they get a tax receipt for it.
It’s probably already switched on
Donations are on by default for every organisation. If your page is claimed and you’ve added a bank account for payouts, your Donate button is already live. There is nothing to set up.
Supporters see it in two places:
- On every raffle page, beside the Follow button in the organiser’s row.
- On your organisation page, next to your raffles.
The donation is its own quick checkout, separate from the ticket order, so a supporter can buy their tickets and then give, or do it the other way round.
A gift given from a raffle page is recorded against that raffle, so you can see which raffle prompted it. That’s attribution only. The money is yours either way, and it never touches the raffle’s proceeds, ticket count or draw.
You also get a donate link of your own, which opens your page with the donation checkout already open:
https://tickets.rafflelink.com/your-org-slug?donate=1It’s made for the moments your supporters are most generous: the thank-you email after they’ve bought their tickets, the post-draw wrap-up, or the reply to someone who has asked how else they can help.
You are never charged a fee on donations
This is the part we’d most like you to take away. Every gift reaches you in full.
When a supporter gives, the checkout offers to add a small amount on top to cover card processing. The box is ticked by default and they can untick it. If they do, RaffleLink absorbs the cost. Your payout is the same either way.
Receipts go out on their own, tax-deductible where you qualify
Every donation gets a receipt, emailed automatically with a PDF attached. It comes from your organisation: your name as the sender, your logo at the top, and replies to your contact address.
Whether that receipt is tax-deductible is worked out for you. We check your ABN on ABN Lookup for a Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR) endorsement and write the receipt to match:
| Your status | What donors receive |
|---|---|
| DGR endorsed | A tax-deductible donation receipt quoting your ABN. |
| Not endorsed | A thank-you and a record of the gift, with no deductibility claim. |
DGR status is never a requirement for taking donations. It only changes the wording. The one thing worth checking is that your ABN is on file under Settings → Organisation Details, because without it every receipt goes out as a thank-you.
The money arrives weekly, as its own payment
Donations are paid out weekly, into the same bank account as your raffle proceeds. If you
run raffles too, you’ll see two separate credits rather than one lump, and the donation one
carries its own reference (in the form RL Donate 26-0002).
That split is deliberate. A gift and a ticket sale are different kinds of income, and whoever does your books shouldn’t have to unpick them. Each donation payment also comes with an itemised statement you can hand straight to your treasurer.
Where to find it
Open your dashboard and look for Donations in the sidebar, just below Raffles. It has four tabs:
- Donations: every gift, with receipts you can download or resend.
- Donors: the same money grouped by person, so you can see who gives more than once. Anyone who has also bought raffle tickets is flagged, and donors carry a Donor chip in your Supporters list.
- Payouts: each donation payment into your bank account, with its statement.
- Settings: the on/off switch and your minimum gift.
The minimum is $10 by default. You can raise it but not lower it, and it’s worth a thought before you do: lots of $10 gifts often add up to more than a higher floor collects from a few.
A couple of exceptions
Donations aren’t available to fundraisers raising money for an individual. A gift to a person isn’t a donation to an organisation and can never carry a tax-deductible receipt. And if someone set your page up on your behalf, your organisation needs to claim it first, because donations are your organisation’s own money. Ticket sales are unaffected in both cases.
If you’d rather not take donations at all, turn the switch off in Donations → Settings. Your raffles carry on exactly as before.
The full detail is in the Help Centre under Donations. And if you have a question we haven’t answered, reply to any of our emails or call us on 0468 181 779.
