The drawing where the prize pays for itself
A 50/50 splits the pot: half to the winner, half to your organization. Nobody has to donate a prize and nothing is bought up front, which is why it is the most common fundraiser at games, dinners and festivals. It is also the format people watch most closely, because the prize is cash.
Free for up to 100 entrants. No subscriptions.
How a 50/50 works
Supporters buy tickets during the event. Every ticket sold grows a single pot. At the end — halftime, last call, before the speeches — one ticket is drawn, and the holder takes half the pot. The other half goes to whatever you are raising for.
That is the whole appeal. There is no prize to solicit, no inventory, and no risk of spending money on something nobody wants. The more tickets sold, the bigger the prize, so the incentive to keep selling runs right up to the draw.
The catch is trust. Because the prize is cash and the pot is counted by the same people running the drawing, a 50/50 attracts more scepticism than any other format. That is exactly the problem a verifiable draw solves.
Three steps, start to finish
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1
Record who bought in
Sell tickets however you already do — cash at the table, a QR code, an online form. Enter buyers as you go, or share the signup link and let them enter themselves. Someone who buys ten tickets gets ten chances, not one.
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2
Close entries at the whistle
When selling stops, close the raffle. The entrant list is fixed from that moment and the audit trail records exactly when.
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3
Draw in front of the room
Press draw. The winner and a SHA-256 proof publish together, on a public page you can put on the screen or read out the link to.
Built for this shape of drawing
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Built for the format people trust least
A cash prize counted by the organizers is the classic setup for suspicion. Every Rafflebase draw publishes the seed and hash behind it, so anyone in the room can re-run the computation themselves.
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Multiple tickets count properly
Entries are weighted, so buying ten tickets really is ten chances. The odds are what your sellers told people they were.
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A record after the fact
The entrant list, the timestamps and the draw all stay on record. When a treasurer reconciles the pot next week, the drawing half of it is already documented.
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No cut of the pot
Free up to 100 entrants, then a one-time $25 for that raffle. Nobody takes a percentage of what is in the bucket.
Worth knowing
Rafflebase does not collect ticket money or hold the pot — you sell and pay out however you already do, and we handle the entries, the draw and the proof. Worth knowing too: because the prize is cash, 50/50 drawings draw more licensing scrutiny than prize raffles in many states. Check your state’s charitable gaming rules before you sell tickets.
Common for these groups
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Sports clubs
Season-long booster drawings across a dozen teams, without a shoebox of cash.
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Fire & EMS
The annual drawing, run so the community can check it rather than assume.
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Veterans posts
Weekly and annual drawings for posts that have run them on paper for decades.
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Golf tournaments
On-course drawings, mulligan packages and the 50/50, run from a phone at the turn.
50/50 raffle, specifically
- Does Rafflebase collect the ticket money?
- No. You sell tickets the way you already do — cash, card reader, Venmo, a donation page — and pay the winner out yourself. Rafflebase records who entered, how many entries each person holds, runs the draw and publishes the proof. You can mark entrants as paid and send payment reminders on an upgraded raffle.
- How do multiple tickets per person work?
- Each entrant carries an entry count, and the draw is weighted by it. Someone who bought ten tickets has ten chances out of the total, exactly as if ten paper stubs went in the bucket.
- Can we run one at every home game?
- Yes — create a separate raffle per game. Each keeps its own entrant list, its own draw and its own results page, so the season is on record rather than in a notebook.
- Is a 50/50 raffle free to run here?
- Free up to 100 entrants, including the public signup page, the verified draw and the audit trail. Past that it is a one-time $25 for that raffle, which lifts the cap and adds CSV export, multiple winners, signup alerts and payment reminders. We never take a share of the pot.
Run your 50/50 raffle
Add your entrants, draw, and share a result nobody has to argue about.