Raffle Ideas

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shadesong is holding a raffle to raise money so her daughter Elayna can attend an educational summer camp.

This got me thinking about audience overlap. shadesong has multiple projects including community-sponsored Wind Tunnel Dreams, and collaborative Shayara. So there are several partially overlapping audiences in play here to begin with ... and then it gets really complicated. She started with a handful of raffle prizes, and invited other people to contribute more. I don't have cash for a raffle ticket, but I volunteered to do a papercraft poem as a prize. Quite a few folks in the loop have creative talents of one kind or another. The result is a fine diversity of prizes, some of which would be hard to afford otherwise.

Now, one criticism of cyberfunded creativity is that it can turn into a closed-loop system, and those don't work. It's not helpful for a circle of friends to pass the same $5 or so around and around. When audience members overlap several projects, their available spending money can get split. But when each creator has a sizable audience, not all of those people will overlap with other audiences. The ones who do overlap, help spread the word. In this case, a raffle draws together many creative people (and potentially all their audiences) for a single cause. That's an asset. Even after the raffle ends, some audience members may continue to follow a new project they discovered. I think this has potential.

What do you think?