Queen of Hearts for charities
One card is revealed each week. The jackpot builds until somebody’s card is the queen.
Most raffle formats are done in a weekend. Queen of Hearts is built to run for months, which makes it a different kind of fundraiser to plan for, not just a different kind of drawing.
What Queen of Hearts is
A 54-card board, one card drawn and revealed each week. Supporters select a card ahead of the draw, and if their card is the one revealed, they win that week’s prize or a share of the jackpot. If the queen of hearts itself hasn’t been drawn yet, the jackpot rolls forward and grows. The draws continue, week after week, until somebody’s card is the queen.
Supporters select a card. That’s the language, always.
This isn’t a style preference. The language is what keeps a Queen of Hearts raffle correctly framed as a raffle, and it matters for staying compliant. Supporters select a card. That’s the only verb we use, on this page and everywhere else we write about the format, and we’d recommend your own materials do the same.
More than one ticket can go on the same card
One card on the board might have two hundred tickets selecting it. Its neighbor might have none. That’s normal, and it’s exactly how the format is supposed to work, since supporters are free to pick whichever card they like, and popular cards naturally attract more entries.
Chance2Win supports this natively. Most raffle tools assume one ticket per card, which breaks down the moment your Queen of Hearts fundraiser gets any real traction. This is one of the more common reasons an organization running Queen of Hearts on a generic raffle tool ends up calling us partway through a season.
Running a season, not a weekend
The weekly cadence
A Queen of Hearts fundraiser needs a reliable weekly rhythm: the same day, the same announcement, week after week. Automating the weekly draw and the jackpot update is what makes this manageable without someone manually running it every single week for months.
Keeping supporters engaged between draws
A running jackpot total is the easiest thing to promote each week. As it grows, so does interest, since a bigger number is a better reason to select a card that hasn’t been picked yet.
It fits alongside other fundraising
Because it runs quietly in the background, many organizations run Queen of Hearts at the same time as a separate, shorter raffle without the two competing for attention.
Selling online and in person, together
The same one-pool approach that applies to every format here applies to Queen of Hearts too: see how it works.
Where to go for the full rules and odds breakdown
Queen of Hearts has its own dedicated resource, with the full rules, odds, and format detail this page doesn’t try to duplicate.
OnlineQueenOfHearts.com covers the format in full, including the odds math and board mechanics we don’t repeat here.
Where else to go from here
We’ll look at your raffle before you sell anything
Every organization goes through a review before tickets go on sale. It isn’t a sales call. It’s the step that catches a raffle structure that was never going to work.