Local raffles can go online

By Shelley Smith

ssmith@salisburypost.com

What if a local high school or non-profit organization was selling raffle tickets as a fundraiser, and someone in a different state or even a different country wanted to purchase a ticket or two?

William Boyd of Salisbury has developed a Web site and computer program to allow just that.

Boyd's Web site, www.giraffles.com, was developed to help nonprofits raise funds and market their services online.

"We all know people who live somewhere else," Boyd said. "It's the same thing as printing off raffle tickets, however, digital tickets are instead purchased from the Internet."

The computer program, which Boyd wrote himself, allows the organization to create a free account. Once that organization decides what the prize for the raffle is, how many tickets they are selling, and what the tickets will cost, they can enter all the information into the Web site, including a photo of the prize. The computer does the rest.

The only cost to the organization is 35 cents per ticket sale for tickets that are $9.99 or less. For tickets costing more than $10 each, the fee for each ticket is 6 percent of the ticket price.

"Instead of the organization having to pay for the cost of the ticket printed off, the cost of the ticket is deducted," Boyd said.

The computer program keeps track of how many tickets are sold and who bought each ticket, and picks a winner at random.

"It is built into the computer program which I wrote myself," Boyd said.