At the end of May a new win a house competition was launched on a raffle site called Cathedral Competitions. The prize on offer is a £500,000 home in a a sought after village in Kent and the site aimed to make a £100,000 donation to charity. Unusually for this kind of promotion ticket prices were set at a very high £45 which caused us to conclude, in our review, that we’d expect ticket sales to be slow. The basis for this conclusion is that other sites have recently been struggling to get sales at ticket prices of £2 and £5.
“50% Of Tickets Sold”
On the 7th July however Cathedral Competitions posted the following to their Facebook page: “Almost 50% of our tickets are now sold, grab YOURS before its too late”. According to their page there’s 33,333 tickets available for this particular raffle but the number required for the competition to go ahead could be considerably less. Typically – as we’ve seen with other raffle sites such as Elite Competitions – it’s around half. But Cathedral are quite clearly saying 50% of tickets sold, so is that half of the 33,333?
Number Of Tickets In Stock
However a lot of raffle sites like to show how many tickets they’ve sold although this isn’t available on Cathedral. At least not on the visible pages. Look within the source code (HTML) and you can find a line of code which shows the number of tickets in stock. At time of writing this is 33296 tickets in stock for the house competition. Does that mean there are 33296 of the available 33333 waiting to be bought?
Have They Found A Way To Succeed?
Loquax has an active house raffle community and one user raised the tickets in stock question to the site and were told that the site wasn’t “showing an updated ‘in stock’ counter”. It may well be that there is an error but the ‘in stock’ number has dropped by 2 since we were made aware of the 50% of tickets sold claim. So how have Cathedral Competitions managed to get to “almost 50% of our tickets sold” at a staggering £45 a ticket? Are they bluffing? Is the counter on the site wrong? Or have they genuinely found a way to succeed where so many have failed?
Deleted Facebook Message
To find out we posted a message on their Facebook page basically asking them if they could verify the 50% claim, why the counter was showing 33296 tickets available and how their success would make a good blog post. After some high profile raffles like Win My Dream 2, Cwellyn Dream 2 and Raffle House not creating home winners we need some good news for the sector. Suprisingly, or maybe not depending on your level of sceptism, Cathedral Competitions deleted the comment. Obviously they want anyone questioning why their social media say 50% of sales whilst their website indicates just 0.1%!
Transparency Is Always Key
We genuinely hope they have sold these tickets because it gives the house raffle sector a massive boost. It would demonstrate that high ticket prices, a limited social media presence, not much advertising and the hiring of ex-Googlebox stars Steph & Dom as influencers is a useful formula to pick apart. However if it turns out that their claims are false then that can seriously damage house raffles. Transparency is key and that includes being upfront about the number of tickets sold as well as having a definitive closing date. We doubt Cathedral Competitions will respond to our blog post but you might want to get your own answers before deciding to purchase from them.