Five Years Raffling Off Everything From Watermelons to $50 Bills

The first items Linda Hanley ever raffled off were four dozens of donuts. In the five years since, she has raffled off over 400 prizes of various worth, all free, to Western Springs residents and other subscribers to her weekly (sometimes bi-weekly) e-mails.

Hanley, a real-estate agent with Charles Rutenberg Realty, buys all the prizes locally, or has them donated by Western Springs businesses in exchange for some free publicity. She delivers them in person to the winners’ homes—as long as they’re Village residents; one winner lived in the UK!—and takes a snapshot for her blog, Western Springs Info. [Full disclosure: Hanley has previously written for Patch as a freelancer.]

“I needed to come up with something to meet new people,” said Hanley, a 37-year resident of Western Springs. “Because I live and work in the town, and like to promote the town, it was a natural fit.”

The raffle, launched in March of 2007, is a way for Hanley to foster both community spirit and her business. She stays extremely well-informed about the Village, using her blog (launched in 2009) and e-mails to keep people updated on Western Springs goings-on, especially real estate.

“She’s always got interesting tidbits in there about the real estate market and what’s going on around town,” said reader and raffle-subscriber Damian Marshall, who has won treats from in the past. “She always posts the pictures of the people who win, so I get to see people I know.”

“Linda's site is really fun, and I love the Western Springs news and history tidbits she includes,” added Laureen Dunne, another perennial contestant, via e-mail. “She has been a longtime resident and realtor in this area, and people really respect her.”

Hanley’s raffle (the idea for which she credits her son) works rather like radio contests that reward the nth caller. She picks a number between 1 and 200 and includes it in the e-mail, along with the description of the week’s prize, the photo of last week’s winner and some boilerplate self-advertizing. If readers are interested in the prize, they click a large link at the bottom of the e-mail—and if they’re that number click-through, they win.

For example: this week’s edition credited last week’s fruit-basket winner Alison Kelly of La Grange, commented on the unseasonably warm weather and offered up a bouquet to the next winner. (When Patch noted that she had accidentally omitted the winner number for the week, Hanley good-naturedly put the power in our hands—in the spirit of Douglas Adams, we picked 42.)

“It reminds me that the town has a lot of really nice people in it,” Hanley said of the raffle. “I get to peoples’ houses, some of them are waiting for me, invite me in to see their new kitchen. One had me in for dinner… It’s really kind of nice.”

And sometimes she gets a funny anecdote or two out of it as well.

“One week, I raffled off a puppy,” she recalled. “It was a fake puppy, but the mother who won thought that they’d won a real puppy, and she was really worried!”

“I think she was very forward-thinking in what she did, and sensed there was a void in the community that needed to be filled,” said subscriber Dennis Mason, once the winner of a bottle of barbeque sauce. “I think it was very clever of her to do this… It was pretty good thinking, and a pretty good way to market what she does.”

The prizes run the gamut in value from dollar lottery tickets to crisp $50 bills, and everything in-between (watermelons, grill brushes, sirloin from Casey’s, etc.), but Hanley noted that while she certainly saw more fervor and more entrants over the cash, residents’ excitement at winning was no less for a small prize than for a larger one.

“It amazes me how happy people are, even if it’s something [small,]” she said. “Kids always like it when their family wins. I’ll get there and they’ll all be waiting because they want to be in the picture.”

To sign up for Hanley’s free raffle and try your luck at winning something, visit this page on her Western Springs Info blog.