Hi Kim,
The 39 days of raffles happened when I was speaking with a seasoned walker who mentioned that she does a raffle each year, kind of like the ones the kids sell for baseball etc, but instead she did donations from local businesses. I thought it was brilliant. When my friend and I were going to the starter party last year we hit up a few local businesses along they way w/ a cover letter and attached the business letter that you can get from your walker buddy w/ the tax id info. We were shocked at how easy it was to get donations. Don't get me wrong some said not at this time as the economy was in the middle of tanking and one store owner actually declined us with tears in his eyes as his first wife had passed way from the disease. Naturally we told him that we understood and took her name and told him we would walk in her memory.

Once donations started coming in I got every excited and started to think 'outside of the box'. I wanted different donations so men and women would be willing to purchase a tickets. I've had everything donated from restaurant certificates, car washes, haircuts, remote car starters, deep sea fishing, whale watches, camping trips, white water rafting, grocery store certificates, ski tickets, baskets from local direct sales reps. Thats when I said Im going to run it for 39 days (my teammate thought I was insane but I was determined!) Both years I have had over 50 donations. You don't know until you ask right?

My cover letter was pretty basic, Introduced myself as the team leader and what we are doing. We are looking for donations from local businesses to help with our raffle and of course we thought of xyz company! Email those that you can find emails for...some will respond telling you that you need to fax over the tax letter etc.
We bought raffle tickets from raffleticket.com Ask EVERYONE you know to sell them for you! last year I put those people that sold into a special drawing for a special gift.