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How To Turn Your Raffle Into An Illegal Lottery

September 30, 2026

by:

Joe Patti

So somehow Ellis Carter’s Charity Law Blog fell off the feed I receive. I have since fixed that and rediscovered my delight at all the interesting and useful content she provides.

Back in July she had a great post on the various mistakes charities make in running their charity drawings. Most charities will avoid the prohibition on lotteries by providing a method to enter without purchase.

However, in order to avoid running afoul of regulators, everyone has to have an equal chance at winning. If someone gets more entries by donating more money, a regulator view that as a consideration required to win and the sweepstakes becomes reclassified as a unlicensed lottery according to Carter.

Marketing copy can undo your own rules just as easily. We regularly see charities include the mandatory “no purchase necessary; a donation will not increase your odds of winning” language in the official rules, then market the exact opposite everywhere else on the same page: “the more you give, the more entries you get,” “triple your chances,” and so on. If your own marketing tells donors that giving improves their odds, you’ve handed a regulator, or a plaintiff’s attorney, the argument that your official rules are fiction

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Another thing she points out is that donations which gain someone a chance to win are not tax-deductible. Unlike with tickets to a gala or fundraising event where the amount over the cost of the meal can be deducted, in most cases if the donation is tied to a chance to win then none of it is tax-deductible.

If a donor’s payment functions as the price of a chance to win, the IRS treats the donor as having received full consideration for that payment, the same rule that makes a raffle ticket non-deductible….

Where a chance to win is only a minor add-on to an otherwise ordinary payment, like a raffle drawing bundled into a gala ticket, the analysis softens into an ordinary quid pro quo problem: ….But charities that price entries per dollar given are much closer to the raffle-ticket rule than the gala-ticket rule, and they should stop telling donors their gifts are “fully tax-deductible” without qualification.

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The post covers some other issues organizations running charity raffles may face. For example, in California, it is only a raffle if the ticket is paper with a detachable stub. You can’t have digital entries.

In some states, you have to register and file a bond once the prize reaches a certain dollar value threshold. This can vary by state. In Florida it has to be done in 7 days from. In New York, it is 30 days.

Reporting winnings over $600 has to be on a form W2-G, not a 1099. At a certain threshold, the charity is responsible for handling the withholding of federal taxes.

There are likely a lot of other nuances specific to states and municipalities. These are just some of the things Carter advises people to pay attention to. I’m not a lawyer like she is and I am sure she would tell you to consult a source other than a blog for real advice.

Fundraising, Info You Can Use, Legal Topics

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Kudos For Ruth Hartt

September 23, 2026

by:

Joe Patti

I am going to use today’s post to send kudos to Ruth Hartt who was named a LinkedIn Top Voice for her posts in the Arts and Culture sphere. There are a heck of a lot of people on the LinkedIn editorial board’s list as you might imagine.

I was surprised she caught their eye amid all the other traffic on the site. From her post about the honor, I think she was as well.

They called out one of her recent posts about New Bedford Symphony’s redesign of their website to be more customer centered rather than organization centered as one of their favorites.

I have been following her work and writing about it for the last five years (I would have said it was three before I searched). I have definitely felt like the quality and focus of her work has been growing over that time.

While I really enjoyed the post LinkedIn called out, that was the icing on the cake of her work. The core deliciousness of said cake in my mind was her post about the data collection, surveying, and personalized customer centered messaging New Bedford Symphony used in a pilot program that resulted in three-fold increase in purchases and revenue than the year prior and nearly three times the conversion rate of the control group of their pilot.

If you haven’t been following her, take a closer look.

Advocacy, Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, Business Models

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Filters Beat Search Bars On Culture Websites

September 22, 2026

by:

Joe Patti

Supercool Design in the UK released a small study this summer with information I didn’t know I wanted.

They examined the use of search filters on cultural organizations’ websites. Not something I really ever thought I wanted to know, but was curious to read about once I knew the data existed.

The big finding was….people aren’t using filters as much as you might think.

Even on the website where filters got used the most – with twenty-seven pages of event listings – nearly half of all users ignored the filters altogether.

Moreover, even when people did use the filters, they tended to just use one, maybe two. Across our sample the most-used filters were genre, date, and then either location (where this was an option) or audience type (e.g. kids shows versus adult shows). This was true no matter if a website had three filters or nine: the vast majority of visitors only used one filter, and it was most often either ‘date’ or ‘genre’.

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Another interesting insight was that when filters are hidden, people don’t use them. Yeah I know, you’re thinking “No duh!” What they found was when filters were concealed under Advanced Options, they didn’t get used. When filters are revealed, people use them a lot more. In the case of the British Museum, the use of filters “jumped massively.”

Though they also revealed that for many websites, the three filters appearing on the top of the list got used the most.

They suggest making all the filters visible and if you are concerned about the clutter that results, consider whether you really need the terms you would relegate to Advanced Options.

The final insight that provided was a little counter-intuitive. People use search bars less than they use filters. They observe it seems strange that people would rather hunt through filter terms than type a few terms in a search bar, but that is what happens.

The only exception we saw to this was in that user testing with the British Library. Here, visitors initially used the listing page search bar more – but only when the filters were hidden behind an “Advanced options” toggle. When we made all the filters visible, people favoured using these to find the information they were looking for.

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Arts in an Age of Technology

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What Music Offices Can Do For The Local Music Scene

September 21, 2026

by:

Joe Patti

Matt Mandrella advocates for every city having a music office in a recent Fast Company piece. He cites the impact of music offices in Texas, Tulsa, and Huntsville.

He says you don’t get these results from just booking shows. The disjointed efforts of individual entities is often inefficient and results in duplicated efforts. Music offices can streamline and coordinate efforts and perhaps most importantly, can work to develop the infrastructure, policy, and support networks for venues, artists, schools, restaurants, and allied businesses.

A good illustration of this is found in a blog post I wrote last November on another Fast Company article Mandrella authored on Huntsville’s efforts to support house concerts. The city was providing support in everything from noise ordinance training, advice on forming LLCs, and pointing would be venues to ticketing services.

Arts Midwest published some related research this past summer.

He offers advice for forming music offices, advocating for the solicitation of feedback and input all the entities in the municipality from the largest to the smallest, most commercial to most niche. It shouldn’t just be the venues, musicians, equipment and labor providers and businesses directly associated with performances, but also schools and other entities contributing to the development of the local talent pipeline.

Second, it is important to prioritize local ownership, legacy venue protections, and underrepresented artists in program design. Who has typically been left on the sidelines and needs a megaphone? Where do you have the most impact opportunity?

Lastly, do not underestimate the importance of the less exciting aspects of a successful music sector: zoning reform, noise ordinances, and affordability policies needed to accompany cultural investment to prevent gentrification and inequities

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Government Relations, Legal Topics, Working In The Arts

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