A School of Emergent Priorities research poster surveys self-reported selling minutes across 48 club raffle panels and finds effort concentrated among a minority of volunteers, prompting a new minimum-quota roster rule.
A survey across 48 club raffle panels finds ticket-selling effort concentrated in a minority of volunteers, and a new minimum-quota roster rule follows
A raffle night raises money for the club regardless of whose hands did the selling, at least as far as the total in the ticket-money tin can tell you. A new research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities looks instead at who did the selling, and finds the answer is a good deal narrower than any club roster suggests.
The poster, led by Postdoctoral Fellow Petra Umbile with Professor Verity Marris and Senior Lecturer Ronja Oyelaran, draws on a purpose-built module of the University’s long-running Strategic Drift Survey, fielded across 48 suburban club raffle panels over a single winter round. Volunteers self-reported the minutes they spent actively selling — approaching, calling, and tallying — rather than simply rostered on the night, and the resulting distribution, sorted by how long each volunteer has served the panel, settles into a familiar shape: a long tail of modest effort and a handful of volunteers carrying most of the total.
An average tells you the round went fine. A distribution tells you who it went fine for.
— Professor Verity Marris, Director, Trajectory Analytics Group
The finding extends the School’s evaluation-ecosystem agenda somewhere it had not yet reached: the volunteer table itself. The Group reads the distribution as an allocation question rather than a wellbeing one, and the community-partnership funding round now asks every registered panel to tally and publish a minimum selling-time figure per volunteer, with no exemption carried between nights. Dr Oyelaran, who has spent years asking what a consultation actually consults on, sees the module’s next task as checking whether the figure changes who sells or just changes what gets written down about it.
The full research poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.utmsxe.