OneThing #21 - FINISH MQ Raffle Tix!

Technically, I finished this one a week early. However! It has been on my to-do list for over ten months and the annual quilt show is in two weeks. I really, really, really wanted to finish it. I'm setting this to publish on Sunday, May 31 to keep me on track with my OneThing project.

 

The Minnesota Quilters have baskets of fabulous prizes (mostly or all donated?) and people can buy one dollar tickets to put in the various baskets to try to win the raffles.

 

MQ likes to collect the contact info of the entrants . . . but I'm not sure the info gets used. Or how it gets used. I put all the info into a database last year (from the 2024 show) and it seemed to go pretty quickly (or I'm getting super forgetful).

 

Last summer / fall, I was asked to again take care of the data on the raffle tickets. Sure! No big deal. I set up my Excel sheet with these column headers:

Last name

First name

Phone number

Email address

Baskets 1-15 (15 columns)

Mailing address

Additional info

 

Once it was set up and I had entered all the data for basket 1 people, I thought I was on a roll. I sorted by first name because that was quicker for me. I alphabetized the tickets by first name and had "new" names for each basket I did. The repeats were quicker - just add the number of tickets for whichever basket I was doing.

 

Then this project sat from about October through March or April. Dude! I needed to get back at it. I started bringing an envelope of tickets with me when I was subbing so I could sort them into alpha order to make it quicker to do the data entry when I was back home at my laptop.

 

I didn't actually track my hours, but I believe I spent 80-100 hours total on this project! IF I agree to do it next year, I plan to enlist helpers for alphabetizing them and doing the data entry. This was way more time than I planned to spend on a little helper project. There were approximately 4,000 tickets in the fifteen baskets.

 

Because I love to add pictures (and I've been assured that the tickets are no longer needed), here's what will go into the burn barrel:

 

It doesn't look like 4,000 tickets and 100 hours of work, does it? Ah, well. It's done and I'm happily moving on.