How to Run a Fair Giveaway Drawing

Decide the rules before you collect a single entry

Almost every giveaway dispute traces back to a rule that was never written down. Before you promote anything, decide and publish: who is eligible, when entries close, how many entries one person may have, how the winner will be chosen, how they will be contacted, how long they have to respond, and what happens if they do not.

Write it in plain language and keep it somewhere entrants can find it. Then follow it exactly, even when following it is inconvenient — particularly then.

Clean the entry list before you draw

Export your entrants into a single column: one entrant per row. Strip surrounding whitespace, remove blank rows, and decide how you will treat entries that differ only by capitalisation or a trailing space.

Duplicates need an explicit decision rather than a default. If your rules said one entry per person, remove duplicates before drawing. If extra entries were earned — for referrals, for example — then duplicates are the mechanism and should stay, or better, be expressed as weights so the extra chances are visible in the record.

Do the cleaning before you open the picker, and keep the original export. If anyone questions the result later, being able to show the raw list and the cleaned list is worth more than any explanation.

Eligibility is your job, not the tool’s

A random picker selects from the list it is given. It cannot tell whether an entrant is old enough, lives in an eligible country, is an employee, already won last month, or completed the entry requirement. Every one of those checks has to happen before the list reaches the draw.

The practical approach is an exclusion list. Keep a running list of staff, recent winners and known ineligible entrants, and paste it into the exclusion field every time. That way the removal is applied consistently and appears in the draw record.

Draw alternates at the same time as winners

Winners go quiet. It happens in almost every draw of any size, and the moment it does you face a choice: run a second draw, or have a plan.

Drawing alternates in the same pass gives you the plan. The tool draws winners and alternates together without replacement, so the alternates are already ranked — if winner two never replies, alternate one is promoted. There is no second draw to explain and no suspicion that the redraw was targeted.

Publish how many alternates you drew and in what order, alongside the winners.

Decide redraw rules in advance

State the response window before the draw: 48 hours, five days, whatever suits your prize. When it expires, promote the next alternate and record why.

The redraw reason field exists for exactly this. “Winner did not respond within 72 hours” in the draw record is the difference between a documented process and an accusation you cannot answer.

Keep a record you can show

A good record contains the draw name, the timestamp, how many entries were pasted, how many duplicates were removed, how many were excluded, the eligible count, the winners, the alternates, and the settings used. The Giveaway Winner Picker produces exactly this and lets you copy, download or print it.

For higher-value promotions, consider recording your screen while you draw, or drawing in front of a witness. Neither is a legal requirement in most places, but both are cheap and they end arguments quickly.

What this guide is not

Prize promotions are regulated, and the rules differ by country, by state or province, and by platform. Some jurisdictions require registration or bonding above a prize value; some require specific wording; most social platforms have their own promotion policies that apply on top of the law.

This is a process guide, not legal advice. For anything with significant value, check the rules that apply to you — and check the platform policy too, since violating it can remove your post regardless of what the law says.