Why we built Swell (and why it might make sense for your charity)

Most charities don't want to become lottery operators, and that's a reasonable thing to not want. Running a licensed Class 3 lottery properly means DIA compliance, an authorised purpose that holds up to scrutiny, independent draw supervision, audited prize statements, and a real marketing operation to sell enough tickets to make it worthwhile. That's a lot of new infrastructure to build for an organisation whose actual job is delivering a cause.

That gap is basically why Swell exists. Swell is itself a New Zealand charity, and a lottery run with a partner charity is a joint undertaking between us, not a service Swell sells to someone else. Three things are worth explaining properly.

One: the practical weight of running it well sits with Swell, as our contribution to the partnership.

A charity partnering with Swell doesn't need to separately learn gambling law or build ticket-selling infrastructure from nothing. Swell takes on the bulk of the practical work involved in running the lottery properly — the compliance groundwork, the day-to-day administration, the marketing needed to actually reach ticket buyers. That's genuinely demanding work, and it's Swell's role in the partnership, in the same way the charity partner brings its own cause, community and credibility to the same joint effort. We've written elsewhere about what it actually takes to run a licensed lottery; it's a real undertaking, and pooling that effort between charitable partners is the point.

Two: recurring beats one-off, if you can actually build it.

Grants get applied for and sometimes granted. Donations rise and fall with the news cycle and the season. Events take enormous volunteer effort for a single night's return. None of that gives a charity much certainty to plan around. A well-run lottery, run properly and repeatedly, is a fundamentally different shape of funding: recurring, plannable, and not dependent on asking the same donors for the same thing again every few months.

Three: net proceeds are shared as part of a genuine joint charitable purpose, not carved off as a fee.

This is the one worth being precise about. Swell isn't a contractor being paid to run a lottery on a charity's behalf, taking a margin and passing on what's left. The lottery is a shared undertaking between charitable partners, and net proceeds are distributed accordingly, as a genuine reflection of the joint work, not a service fee deducted before the charity sees anything. That distinction matters both practically and legally: New Zealand's gambling rules are specifically designed to stop anyone profiting from simply moving tickets, and a real partnership between charities is a fundamentally different thing to a paid operator taking a commission.

None of this is about replacing the fundraising a charity already does well. It's meant to sit alongside it: a shared funding pathway, run properly, between partners who are both genuinely working toward a charitable outcome.