How Manly Freshwater Parish Raised $103,000 for Its 150th Anniversary
In 1876, the Parish of Manly was formally established on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. A century and a half later, Manly Freshwater Parish (the churches of St Mary Immaculate in Manly and St John the Baptist in Freshwater) marked the anniversary with a year of celebrations called Waves of Grace, with a raffle as a key component.
Over ten weeks, from 13 June to 27 August 2026, the raffle raised $103,000 from 888 supporters.
The prizes were generous: a Chery Tiggo 4 SUV, a $14,000 Flight Centre holiday voucher, two eBikes and three Nintendo Switch 2 consoles. But prizes alone don’t sell 5,000 tickets. Three decisions did most of the work, and none of them needs a big budget.
1. They sold to the people closest to them first
The parish didn’t start by chasing strangers. It started with the people who already cared most: its own congregation, in the place they already gathered every week.
Sunday became the raffle’s busiest day by a distance, bringing in nearly 30% of everything raised, much of it on Sunday mornings around Mass. That’s about three times the share Sunday usually brings in across raffles on RaffleLink. The weekly parish bulletin carried a running tally, so every Sunday the congregation could see how far the raffle had come.
It’s the simplest lesson in fundraising and the easiest to forget: your best first buyers are the people who already know you. If your community already meets at a fixed time each week (a Sunday service, a Saturday junior sport morning, a club’s members’ night), that’s where your raffle should be, every week, for as long as it runs.
2. They made five tickets the obvious choice
Tickets were $25 each, or five for $100: the fifth ticket free. The parish backed it with a simple challenge to every household: buy five, sell five.
Supporters took it up. 88% of the money came through the five-ticket pack.
This is one of the most consistent patterns we’ve seen in more than a decade of raffles. Across over 3,700 raffles run on RaffleLink since 2013, supporters offered a ticket pack have spent more than twice as much per order as those offered single tickets only. One clear, generous pack gives people an easy “right” answer, and most of them take it.
3. They gave the wider community a reason to help
A parish’s reach doesn’t stop at the church door. Manly Freshwater has four schools: St Mary’s Catholic Primary in Manly, St John the Baptist Primary in Freshwater, St Paul’s College and Stella Maris College. The parish gave each of them a stake in the raffle.
At checkout, buyers could link their purchase to a student’s family and class. Every linked purchase went into a separate school prize draw, held once a month in June, July and August.
Close to 200 school families took part, linking $22,725 in sales, 22% of the raffle. Every class at St John the Baptist had at least one linked purchase, as did 13 of the 14 at St Mary’s. And while the parish sold on Sundays, the schools sold mostly through the week, so the raffle had a second engine running on different days.
If your organisation has communities attached to it (schools, junior teams, branches), give each one its own name at checkout and its own small prize. “Support the parish” becomes “support your class”.
Online and in person, one pool
Not everyone buys on their phone. The parish’s ticket sellers also recorded $8,500 in in-person sales through RaffleLink’s ticket booth, and every one of those tickets went into the same numbered pool as the online sales: no second book to reconcile, no separate draw.
John Zemek, one of the parish’s raffle organisers, says the format was a considered choice:
“We thoroughly researched the online format after initially planning to go with just physical tickets. RaffleLink provided a really easy solution to the first iteration of our plans in that the dual offering (online and physical tickets) was available. In the end [we] took the very simple ‘online only’ model. RaffleLink’s ‘ticket booth’ provided a really easy way to take in-person sales when buyers were on the spot with cash or a card.”
One hundred and fifty years
The raffle was a significant fundraiser for the renovation of St Mary’s Church in Manly: an interior revamp of painting, varnishing and repairs, plus new lighting, new carpet and a new AV system.
Looking back on the raffle as a whole, John says:
“Overall, the friendly 24/7 assistance with problem solving and advice in the vital weeks before launch, plus the flexibility of the ticket booth, made the journey with RaffleLink great value for money. We enjoyed the whole experience.”
Their supporters, their pricing and their schools: none of it was complicated, and all of it can be copied. The anniversary year closed with a Mass on 13 September, with the raffle’s part already done.
Manly Freshwater Parish ran this raffle on RaffleLink.
