Cars for Christmas

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Grande Prairie and area came through with open hearts and supported the Swan City Rotary Club’s 2020 Cars for Christmas Lottery, despite concerns about the challenges imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dave Cook, the Swan City Rotary Club’s lottery chair said he was very pleased with how things went.

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“We don’t have our final numbers yet as some of our mail tickets haven’t been entered into the system yet.” he added. “People post date them. That is one of the reasons that we do our draw two weeks after our cutoff because there are people who mail them on the (Dec.) 29th and 30th. We still have some coming in so our numbers aren’t final yet.”

The Cars for Christmas made some adjustments, which began early in the spring, spurred on by the fact the club’s other major lottery the Cars and Camping lottery didn’t run last year.

“We do two lotteries—Cash and Camping and Cars for Christmas,” Cook said. “And last year we had to cancel the Cash and Camping lottery because our principal business model was people buying at the great big building, the Cash and Camping building. A large volume of our tickets, more than 50 per cent, I think it was 70 per cent are bought there.

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“So the risk of running a lottery and losing money was really great with COVID restrictions and the fact that people were kind of on a major lockdown. That was tough, so with Cars for Christmas, we put in a lot of effort, starting in April, in terms of retooling our lottery business to make it more appealing to do online.”

As a result the club did a few new things which worked out quite well Cook said.

“We took a real risk and selected more partners than we normally do because they needed the money because of COVID and also got their support.

“We’re feeling pretty good about ourselves because again there is lots of risk and we did really well in terms of managing for that risk. We thank Grande Prairie (and area) for responding very, very positively to our lottery. We are very happy and we ended in a good position. If we end up in a good position the community does because the revenue we collect is distributed to our partner groups, (the revenue also) allocated to other non-profits and charities in this region.”

The club partnered with 13 groups including: Big Brothers/Big Sisters of Grande Prairie, Suicide Prevention, Camp Tamarack, Grande Prairie public school and Grande Prairie Catholic school education foundations, Grande Prairie Gymnastics, PARDS, Senior Outreach Centre with a focus on Meals on Wheels, Impact GP, Rotaract, Swan City Rotary Club, Centre for Creative Arts and the EMS Foundation.

“The regional partners, all the partners we had were really good but the other side is we strongly support local businesses,” the lottery chair said. “They struggle too, so our prizes, almost all of them, were bought here locally.”

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Tickets didn’t sell out but Cook estimated they sold 85 per cent of the available tickets. The final draw for both the Cars for Christmas and Christmas Cash 50/50 ($288,000) are scheduled for Jan. 12 and will be listed on the Cars for Christmas (carsforchristmas.com) website and on the Swan City Rotary Club’s Facebook Page.

Previously, in October a one-dollar-per-ticket-sold promotion raised more than $56,000 for nine regional food banks.

Planning is now underway for this years Cars and Camping lottery.

“We’re busy planning for it right now and we are looking at a real good array of prizes. We think it is going to be a very good lottery. The focus is going to be — obviously it is the normal prizes of trucks and RVs and such — we are looking at staycations as another theme we are promoting.

“We are looking at local businesses and outdoor vacations that are in the area.”