Option 1: a printing company
A specialist raffle printer quoted about $515 for 6,000 numbered tickets in stapled books of 20, plus delivery time. The books are lovely. It is also most of a grand every time you raffle.
Option 2: do it yourself in Word
Free, if you do not count the Tuesday night. A mail merge for numbered tickets, three to a page, with stubs, is genuinely fiddly — and after printing comes the trap: guillotined stacks come out interleaved (1, 4, 7…), so somebody hand-sorts thousands of tickets into books. Schools that have done it once tend not to volunteer twice.
Option 3: print at school with the Studio
6,000 tickets is 2,000 A4 sheets plus 100 built-in cover sheets — call it 4–5 reams of paper (about $30) and roughly $35–$45 of mono toner on a typical office copier. Say $65–$80 in consumables, plus the Studio subscription ($149/year for founding schools) — and the guillotine sorting problem is designed away: every pile comes off the cutter already in number order.
Side by side
| Printer | DIY mail merge | The Studio | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cash cost, 6,000 tickets | ~$515 | ~$70 consumables | ~$70 consumables + $149/yr |
| Volunteer time | none | hours of setup + hand-sorting | print, two cuts, staple |
| Piles in number order | yes | no — interleaved | yes — automatically |
| Second raffle this year | ~$515 again | the Tuesday night again | paper and toner only |
One print run pays for the year three times over — and Easter, Christmas and the fete are all covered by the same subscription.
Prices are what we found for a representative quote and typical office consumables in August 2026 — your printer, paper and toner rates will vary a little.