Revert a raffle to draft
Taking a live raffle back offline — when you can, and when you can't.
Sometimes you activate a raffle and then realise something needs more work — a wrong date, a prize that fell through, a launch you want to hold. If nothing has sold yet (and no paper tickets have been printed or reserved), you can take the raffle back to draft and fix it properly.
How to revert
Revert to draft turns up wherever you're likely to want it:
- On the raffle's overview, in a banner explaining that nothing has sold yet.
- In the ⋯ menu on any of the raffle's management pages.
- On the edit pages, in a banner — handy when you've just hit a field you can't change while live.
- Inside the Cancel raffle dialog, if you land there by mistake.
Wherever you start it, the raffle goes back offline, disappears from public view, and returns to the editable draft state you had before activating. Make your changes, then activate again when you're ready.
Looking for Cancel and not finding it?
On a raffle with no sales, Cancel raffle is hidden from the menu on purpose — reverting does what you want without the cost or the paperwork. Cancel comes back as soon as a ticket sells. See Cancel a raffle.
Who can revert
Admins can revert any of the organisation's raffles. Affiliates and Independent Organisers can revert the raffles they created.
Affiliates and Independent Organisers can't activate a raffle themselves, so going live again works the way it did the first time. If your organisation has affiliate raffle review on, you resubmit with Submit Proposal and an admin approves it again before it's back online. If review is off, you publish it again yourself with Publish Raffle. The Revert to Draft? confirmation tells you which applies before you go ahead.
The catch: nothing sold, nothing printed
You can revert only while the raffle is genuinely untouched: digital sales, paper sales, and reserved paper tickets must all be zero. The moment someone buys in, reverting is off the table — and for good reason. People have paid for a chance in a live raffle; pulling it back to draft underneath them isn't fair to them and isn't compliant.
Printed-but-unsold paper stubs block reverting too. They're numbered against the raffle and hold capacity, so the raffle isn't a blank slate any more. In that case the refusal reads: "Cannot revert to draft because paper tickets have already been printed or reserved".
The Revert to Draft buttons only appear while nothing's committed, so you won't normally see this. One honest wrinkle: the Cancel raffle dialog can still suggest reverting on a raffle with printed paper but no sales. The refusal comes when you confirm.
It's also unavailable while RaffleLink has paused sales on the raffle — that hold has to be sorted out first.
If tickets have already sold
Once there's a sale, you can't revert. If something's genuinely wrong with a live raffle that has sales, don't try to work around it — contact support@rafflelink.com and we'll help you figure out the right path (which might be an edit, a notification to buyers, or in rare cases cancelling and refunding).
Revert vs edit
If your raffle has sales and you just need to change something, you usually don't need to revert at all — most things are editable on a live raffle. See What you can change after activation. Reverting is for the "I need to rebuild this before anyone's involved" case, not routine edits.