How to Pick a Giveaway Winner

Before you announce the giveaway

Most disputes come from rules that were never written down. Decide these first and publish them with the giveaway itself:

• How many winners, and what each one gets.
• Who is eligible — countries, age, whether employees or family are excluded.
• When entries close, with a timezone. "Friday" starts an argument; "Friday 11:59pm ET" does not.
• How duplicate entries are treated. One entry per person, or does every action earn another chance?
• How the draw happens. "A random wheel, drawn live on Saturday" is enough detail.
• How long a winner has to respond before you redraw. 48 hours is common.

If it is not written down before entries open, you cannot introduce it afterwards without it looking like you changed the rules to suit an outcome.

Preparing the entry list

This is where accuracy matters far more than the spin.

1. Export the entries to a spreadsheet — comments, form responses, whatever your entry mechanic was.
2. Remove ineligible entries now, not after the draw. Disqualifying a winner afterwards is the fastest way to lose an audience.
3. Deduplicate, unless multiple entries are meant to be multiple chances. Your spreadsheet's *Remove duplicates* takes ten seconds.
4. If extra entries earn extra chances, do not paste a name five times — use weighting: @handle *5. The result window then reports that entrant's real probability, which answers "why did they win" far better than a list with repeats in it.
5. Check the count against your entry total before you spin. The number under the entrant box should match.

Running the draw

Open the giveaway winner picker and paste the list in.

• Leave remove-after-spin on for multiple prizes so nobody wins twice.
• Press Fullscreen if you are recording — no menus, no browser chrome.
• Set the spin to Dramatic (eight seconds) in the options. Five feels rushed on camera.
• Show the entry count and the odds before you spin. Both are on the strip under the wheel.
• Record in one take. A cut is the first thing a sceptical viewer notices.
• Read the winner twice — off the wheel, then off the result window.
• For several prizes, keep spinning; each winner leaves the wheel automatically.

After the draw

Publish the record. Copy in the winners panel gives you a table with position, name, probability, spin ID and timestamp. Post it. Almost nobody will check it, and that is the point — the ability to check is what stops people wanting to.

Contact winners privately, and announce publicly only once they confirm. Announcing first and then discovering an ineligible winner is a mess.

Say what happens if nobody responds. You already published the window; follow it exactly, and if you redraw, say so and show it.

Keep the entry list for as long as the giveaway could reasonably be questioned. Deleting it immediately looks worse than keeping it.

Do not delete the losing spins. If you recorded five draws and published three, someone will notice.

What a wheel can and cannot prove

Be precise about this, especially if you are the one making the claim.

What is genuinely true: the draw uses crypto.getRandomValues(); the winner is chosen before the animation, so the spin cannot be nudged; every entrant's probability is exactly their share of the wheel; and each result exposes its raw draw and arithmetic.

What is not true: that the draw is audited or independently verifiable. Everything runs in your browser. You could have edited the list between spins, or not shown the spins you did not like — and no client-side tool can prevent that.

So describe it accurately: "drawn at random using a cryptographic random number generator, with the full result log published". That is checkable and true. "Provably fair" is not.

If the prize value or your jurisdiction brings legal requirements into play, follow those rather than a blog post. Rules for prize draws vary a lot by state and country.