Why we built Pitch without prizes or a draw.

The problem with prize draws

A draw changes what you’re actually asking someone to do. Instead of “back your club”, you’re asking “gamble on winning something back”. Those feel similar on the surface, but they pull people’s motivation in different directions, and only one of them is really about the club.

Draws also come with baggage that has nothing to do with football, cricket or the cause itself:

• Prize draws and lotteries sit inside gambling regulation, even at small scale. That’s real compliance overhead for a volunteer treasurer to carry.
• The value of a donation gets muddled with the value of the prize, which makes it harder for a club to say clearly how much support they’ve actually had.
• Not everyone wants to gamble, even for a good cause, and a draw-based model quietly excludes anyone who doesn’t.

None of that is a criticism of clubs who run raffles. It’s a genuinely reasonable way to fundraise, and plenty of causes we admire do it well. It just wasn’t the model we wanted to build a product around.

What we built instead

Pitch works on squares, not tickets. A club or cause sets a grid, supporters back a square for £5 or £10, and that’s it: no draw, no prize, no waiting to find out if you’ve won anything. What you get is a dedication: your name, a message and, if you want, a song, a page, a certificate or your business logo attached to it.

A raffle asks people to gamble on your club. A square asks them to back it.

Put the two models side by side and the difference is plain:

The economics are deliberately simple too. Clubs keep at least 70% of square revenue, and dedications last two years before a renewal nudge goes out. There’s no prize pot to manage, no draw date to promote and no regulatory grey area to navigate: just a straightforward way for supporters to put their name behind something they care about.

Why it matters for clubs

Every layer of complexity we didn’t build is a layer a volunteer doesn’t have to manage. No licence to check, no draw to run fairly, no prize to source and post out. Just a page, a grid and a straightforward payment. That’s not a small thing when the person running your fundraising is doing it alongside a full-time job.

What’s next

Pitch is already reachable through our distribution partnerships across grassroots clubs UK-wide. If you run a club, charity or academy and want to see whether it’s a fit, just get in touch with us.