How to pick a winner for your raffle or contest?

A quick guide on how to choose a winner. There are many ways how your raffle concept can look like. Here are several of the most popular approaches for your raffle.

• Choose a winner at random
• Choose a winner by votes
• Choose a winner by exact guess
• Choose a winner by activity
• Choose a winner who selected a correct answer
• Choose a winner by subjective factors – judges
• Choose a winner by an exact time

Let’s look how each concept works:

Choose a winner at random

This concept means you take all your participants and select winner(s) randomly. You can do it manually or use an application (read more in the next chapter).

Choose a winner by votes

You can engage people by letting them vote for a winner. Every participant gets one, two, three or more points and can assign them between participants. Of course, every participant will vote for himself, but also gives other points to competitors.

Choose a winner by exact guess

Raffle participants must give their estimate to a quantitative question – for example how many people will be in the raffle? How many golf balls can fit in the trunk of a specific car? The closest answer wins.

Choose a winner by activity

Reward the most active participant. Activity means the number of tickets purchased, number of comments, volume, etc.).

Choose a winner who selected a correct answer

Ask a question or a sequence of questions. It can be easy or hard to answer. If several people answered correctly, reward them all or select one random winner.

Choose a winner by subjective factors – judges

Suitable if you organize a creative contest (photography, written content, design, hackathlons, …). Create a jury and let the judges select the winner.

Choose a winner by an exact time

You set the exact time which will determine a winner. A participant must submit his entry at an exact time to be eligible to win. This approach is used rarely as it creates waves in your campaign traffic.

Need to pick a winner at random?

Here are several tips for choosing the right raffle app. Sometimes you don’t need any software, just write all names on small papers and pick the winner from a hat. In some occasions, you will need a more sophisticated way to select a winner.

Case 1: You don’t plan to show the drawing live or prove the fairness of the drawing to anybody

If this is your case, you can do it quickly in an excel spreadsheet. We have prepared a simple excel randomizer template to download t. Put your entries there and excel picks a random winner for you.

You can also use a simple online randomizer – there are many of them available. You can choose for example this random name picker to help you do the task instantly.

The obvious problem is that you don’t have any evidence that the drawing was unbiased, and the prize didn’t go to some of your friends.

Case 2: You want to prove the drawing was unbiased

You will need a clever tool that can identify when somebody is trying to cheat. Such a drawing platform should detect when somebody is trying to repeat the drawing to get the “right” winner or do other bad things to trick the system.

We created our random picker app exactly for this reason –to prove that your drawings are fair and unbiased. There are many measures that RandomPicker includes in order to prevent cheating.

The system also generates a record for each drawing so participants can check that everything went right, and they were in the drawing. You can sign up and try it for free.

Case 3: You want to show the drawing live or publish the recording

You can use any of the above-mentioned approaches and stream the drawing sharing your laptop screen to the canvas or internet. You can also use a live event randomizer that is suited for these opportunities.

It shows the drawing process, countdown and animation on a customized page.

You can share the page with your audience so people can watch the drawing without any special device or software.

The recording is available so people can watch the drawing later.