Here's a number worth staring at. Five hundred scratch cards at two dollars a scratch is $1,000 in potential donations. We print and ship custom scratch cards for school P&Cs, sports clubs and charities all over Australia, and the follow-up story we hear far too often goes like this: the cards looked great, the committee was excited, and six months later half the box is still sitting in a storeroom next to the sausage sizzle gazebo. That's not a printing problem. That's an activation problem.
Scratch cards are one of the cheapest fundraising tools you can put your branding on, which is exactly why teams treat the print run as the finish line. It isn't. The cards are the ammunition. This post covers how to structure prizes, size your print run and write the card itself so the money actually lands in your charity's account instead of staying theoretical.
A scratch card fundraiser makes money when three numbers line up: the donation per scratch, the number of cards that actually get into hands, and the real cost of your prize pool. Printing is usually the smallest cost in the whole exercise, so the biggest financial risk is cards that never get distributed.
Run the numbers on a typical club-sized campaign:
Forty percent of your campaign evaporating because nobody was assigned to hand cards out. That is the single most common failure we see, and it has nothing to do with design, price or the quality of the scratch panel.
The best prize structure for a fundraising scratch card is lots of small wins plus one headline prize, with as much of the prize pool as possible donated by local sponsors. People scratch for the feeling of winning, and a card where one in five people wins a coffee voucher outperforms a card where one person in five hundred wins a big-ticket item and everyone else gets nothing.
Local sponsors are the cheat code here. A café donates ten coffee vouchers, the local physio donates a massage, the hardware store kicks in a gift card. Their logo goes on the card, your prize pool costs you close to nothing, and every scratched card doubles as an ad for the sponsor. We've seen clubs cover an entire prize pool this way and keep nearly every donated dollar.
| Prize structure | Feel for the player | Cost to the charity | Admin load |
|---|---|---|---|
| One big prize only | Exciting on paper, deflating in practice. Most people lose. | High unless donated | Low |
| Many small wins | Frequent dopamine. People buy again. | Low if sponsor-donated | Medium (tracking redemptions) |
| Tiered (small wins + one headline) | Best of both. Small wins keep momentum, the big prize sells the pitch. | Low to medium | Medium |
One production reality worth knowing: decide your prize distribution before artwork goes to print. The winning combinations sit under the scratch panel, so the mix of winners and non-winners is locked in at the press, not something you can adjust after the boxes arrive. Teams who rush artwork approval to hit an event date sometimes discover they printed a prize table they can't actually honour.
Print the number of cards your volunteers can realistically distribute in eight to twelve weeks, not the number that makes the fundraising target look good on a spreadsheet. A netball club with 15 active volunteers who each commit to moving 30 cards can handle 450 cards. Printing 2,000 for that same club just builds a monument to optimism in the clubhouse cupboard.
Work backwards from people, not dollars:
Minimum order quantities on custom scratch cards exist because every run involves plate setup, colour matching for your branding and quality checks on the scratch panel itself. The good news is that fundraising maths rewards scale anyway, since your fixed costs are spread across more two-dollar scratches. If the minimum is more than one event can absorb, plan a second wave: sell at the gala in May, then again at the spring fair. Same cards, same artwork, double the campaign.
A fundraising scratch card has three jobs: tell people what the cause is, tell them what they could win, and tell a winner what to do next. Most cards we're asked to reprint fail the third one.
Your charity's name and logo, the campaign line (one sentence, plain language, something like "Every scratch helps rebuild the clubhouse"), the scratch panel, and the price. Don't bury the cause. People donate to causes, then scratch for fun, in that order.
This is the bit everyone forgets. The back needs redemption instructions a winner can follow without asking anyone. Where to claim, by when, who to contact. Add your website or a QR code to a donation page too, because plenty of people who scratch a losing card will still chip in extra if you make it a ten-second job. A losing scratchie with no next step is a dead end. A losing scratchie with a QR code is a second ask.
Distribution is a job with a name attached, not a vibe. The campaigns that clear their whole print run all do the same unglamorous things.
The mistakes below account for most of the underperforming campaigns we hear about, and every one of them is avoidable before the artwork is even approved.
A scratch card is a printed card with a concealed panel of removable latex-style coating. Scratching the panel reveals a result underneath, usually a prize, a discount or a message. For fundraising, each scratch is sold for a small fixed donation and the hidden result determines whether the buyer wins a prize.
Yes, if you have a distribution plan. Scratch cards are cheap to produce per unit, sell on impulse at two to five dollars a scratch, and carry your charity's branding into hundreds of hands. They underperform only when cards sit undistributed, so commit to a seller roster before you order.
On a custom fundraising scratch card, you design the reveal yourself. The simplest approach is printing the prize name or "thanks for supporting us" directly under the panel, so there's zero ambiguity when someone scratches. Match-three style reveals look fun but create disputes at a stall, so we recommend the direct reveal for charity campaigns.
Possibly, depending on your state and how your campaign is structured. Each Australian state and territory regulates games of chance run for fundraising differently, so check with your state's fair trading or gaming authority before printing.
Yes, custom scratch cards carry a minimum run because each order involves print setup, colour matching for your branding and quality control on the scratch panel. Fundraising campaigns generally benefit from the scale anyway, since more cards means more two-dollar donations against the same setup. Contact us for current minimums on your card size and format.
Allow a couple of months between placing your order and your first selling day. That covers artwork approval, production of the scratch panels, freight to you, and time to brief your volunteer sellers before the campaign kicks off.
A high-resolution version of your logo (vector files like AI, EPS or PDF are ideal), your brand colours, the prize details and the wording for both sides of the card. If your committee doesn't have design resources, our team can set the artwork up around what you send us.
Promo Punks designs and produces custom scratch cards branded with your charity's logo, colours and campaign message, and we'll flag the stuff that trips teams up before it goes to print, from panel placement to prize-table wording. Send us your campaign details and a rough quantity, and we'll come back with options, artwork support and a realistic timeline. Your cause deserves better than a box in the storeroom. Get in touch at promopunks.com.au and put those scratchies to work.
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