Lottery vs. Box Tops for Education Sweepstakes
Why you should enter? Let’s do a probability comparison winning a lottery vs. winning the sweepstakes.
Lottery
Assumptions
- Lottery winning must be greater than what a school can raise by doing Box Tops clipping. (greater than $500).
- Lottery: 5 of 6 must match, a winning of approximately ~$3,500.
The probably of matching 5 of 6 numbers on a lottery is 0.001%. (source)
Sweepstakes
Assumptions
- 35.6 million and 5.6 million students from public and private schools, respectively (source, prekindergarten to 8th). 4 million students are in preschool (source). Subtract the 4 million from the subtotal, and you get 37.2 million students from prekindergarten to 8th grade in the US.
- 50% of schools participate in Box Tops for Education
- 1 parent-student enters the sweepstake
- 18.6 million parent-students=(37.2 million /2)
- Use 20-60-20 rule: top 20% actively participate, 60% casually participate, and 20% no participation.
- Hence, let’s assume 50% of the student-parent participation (this is optimistic)
- Therefore: The total parent-student participate in the US is approximately 9.3 million =(18.6 million /2)
- # of Sweepstake winning: 519 (source)
The math
((519 winning) / (9.3 million parent-student) x 100%)= 0.0056%
Assume now that there are 225 students in your school. So multiply 0.0056% with 225, and this gives you 1.3%!
Results
- 0.0056% chance that 1 person may win a sweepstake
- 1.3% chance that someone in your school wins a sweepstake!!
In conclusion, there is a higher chance of winning the Box Tops for Education sweepstake than matching 5 of 6 number on a lottery. The probability of your school winning a sweepstake goes up if more parents-students participate. It’s very simple to sign up for Box Tops for Education and enter the sweepstakes. It takes about 5 minutes. So why not do it, for your school and your children.
