How to run a company prize draw at a live event

On this page: deciding the format · letting people choose prizes · one win per person · unclaimed prizes · the reveal · what to prepare · FAQ

What format should a company prize draw use?

Pick between a simple pooled draw and an allocated draw, and pick before you tell anyone the rules.

A pooled draw puts everyone in one pool. You draw a name, they get the prize at the top of the list, repeat. Simple to run, simple to explain, and nobody chooses anything.

An allocated draw gives each person tickets they assign to the prizes they actually want. You then draw each prize from the people who put tickets on it. More work, and much better received, because someone who wanted the coffee machine isn’t handed a scarf.

Most companies with a real prize budget end up wanting the second. It’s worth knowing the extra rules it creates before you commit to it, which is the rest of this guide.

How does letting people choose their prizes work?

Each person gets a fixed number of tickets and assigns them across the prizes they’d like. A prize is drawn from the tickets placed on that prize, so wanting something badly and spending several tickets on it improves your odds without guaranteeing anything.

The appeal is obvious: people compete for what they want rather than being assigned a prize at random. It also spreads interest across the prize list instead of concentrating everything on the single best item.

Three rules to settle before you publish it:

Can someone put all their tickets on one prize? Allowing it means a determined person can make themselves the strong favorite for one item. Capping tickets per prize spreads things out. Neither is wrong, but decide before someone asks.

What happens to unspent tickets? If people don’t have to use all their tickets, some won’t, and you need to decide whether unspent tickets do anything at all. The cleanest answer is that they don’t, and that unassigned tickets are simply not in any draw.

What happens to a prize nobody wanted? This one trips people up, and it gets its own section below.

How do you make sure nobody wins twice?

Exclude each winner from every subsequent draw, and say so in the rules before the event starts.

This is the rule most companies want, and the one most likely to go wrong at the event. It sounds trivial. But the pool changes after every prize, so the draws have to run in sequence, and each one has to know the results of the last.

Two things follow from it:

The prize order matters. If you draw the best prize first, everyone is still in the pool for it, which is usually what people expect. If you draw it last, only the people who haven’t won yet are eligible, which some rooms find fairer and others find odd. Either works. Pick one and explain it.

Somebody has to track it live. With a spreadsheet, this is where the evening slows down, because you’re editing a list in front of a hundred people who are all watching you do it. A tool that carries winner exclusion between draws removes the manual step and the argument that comes with it.

What do you do with a prize nobody picked?

Draw it among everyone who hasn’t already won, and write that rule down in advance.

Allocated draws produce this situation reliably. Somebody donated a bottle of something nobody wanted, or a prize looked less appealing on the list than it does in the room. Now you’re holding an unclaimed item with a hundred people waiting.

The fallback that works: any prize with no tickets on it is drawn from all remaining participants who haven’t won yet, regardless of what they originally chose. It gets the prize to a real person, it doesn’t hand a second win to someone already holding a box, and because you published it beforehand nobody thinks you improvised.

Alternatives, both worse: retaining the prize looks mean, and re-offering it to people who already won breaks the one-win rule you just spent the evening enforcing.

A worked example: 60 people, 12 prizes

Numbers make this easier to see. Say you have 60 employees, 12 prizes, and you give everyone three tickets to allocate. That’s 180 tickets spread across the prize list.

The 55-inch TV attracts 44 tickets from 22 people. A coffee machine takes 31. Several mid-range prizes take between 10 and 20 each. A hamper takes 2, because two people really like hampers. And the branded fleece attracts nothing at all.

You draw smallest prize first, largest last, and every winner leaves the pool.

By the time you reach the fleece, eleven prizes have been awarded and eleven people are out. Nobody allocated a ticket to it, so your published fallback kicks in: it’s drawn from the 49 people who haven’t won anything. Someone gets a fleece they didn’t ask for, which is funny rather than unfair, because the rule was on the sheet before anyone allocated a thing.

Two things this makes obvious. The hamper was a near-certainty for those two people, which is worth knowing before you promise it’s a fair fight. And the TV was a 1-in-22 shot for anyone who wanted it, which is a much better story than “everyone had a 1-in-60 chance of something.”

How do you run the reveal at the event?

Show the draw happening rather than reading out results from a list.

This is the part that most affects how the evening feels, and it’s usually the part nobody plans. A name landing on screen, with a pause before it settles, feels like an event. Read off a phone, it’s just an announcement.

Practical things worth getting right:

• Test on the actual screen. Projectors crop, resolutions differ, and a layout that looked fine on a laptop can push the winner’s name off the bottom
• Check the internet in the room, not in the office. Venue wifi is unreliable at exactly the moment two hundred people are on it
• Have somebody driving who isn’t also hosting. Presenting and operating at once produces long silences
• Know what you’ll do if something fails. A printed prize list and a way to draw offline is a five-minute insurance policy
• Decide whether entries are shown. Displaying the pool before each draw is good for trust and bad for pace when the pool is large

What should you prepare beforehand?

• The prize list, in the order you’ll draw it
• The participant list, and how people are identified
• Ticket allocations, closed and locked before the event starts
• The rules, published somewhere people can read them in advance
• The one-win-per-person rule, and the fallback for unpicked prizes
• Who is operating, who is hosting, and what happens if the tech fails
• How winners collect, and what happens for anyone absent

Close allocations before the event, not during it. Letting people change their choices while draws are running makes the result impossible to reconstruct afterward, which is exactly the situation you want to avoid in a room full of colleagues.

How do you keep it defensible afterward?

Publish the result and the method, the same way you would for a public giveaway.

Internal events often skip this because everyone was there. That’s precisely why it matters: the people in the room have to work together on Monday. So publish the result afterward: who won what, in which order, under rules set beforehand. That ends the conversation before it starts.

If you can also show that the pool and the rules were fixed before the draws ran, the “was it arranged” question never gets off the ground. How to prove your giveaway was fair covers what that takes.

Frequently asked questions

Should the draw be anonymous? Usually not for winners, since the point is celebrating them in the room. But think about the entry list. Showing everyone’s ticket allocations reveals who wanted what, which is quite personal. Displaying winners while keeping allocations private is the common middle ground.

What about people who can’t attend? Decide in advance whether absent staff are eligible. Including them is fairer and means somebody has to accept on their behalf. Excluding them is simpler, and you have to say so beforehand rather than when someone notices their name never came up.

Can we run several draws in one event? Yes, and most do, one per prize. The thing to plan for is that each draw depends on the previous one once you’re excluding earlier winners, so they run in sequence and somebody has to keep the pool current between them.

How many tickets should each person get? Enough to spread across a few prizes, few enough that choosing means something. Three to five is common. If people have as many tickets as there are prizes, allocation stops being a choice.

What if two people want the same prize badly? That’s the system working. Both put tickets on it, both have a chance proportional to what they spent, and one wins. What matters is that the odds were visible in advance.

Is a spreadsheet good enough? For a small draw with no allocation and no exclusion rule, yes. It stops being enough once you’re tracking who has already won across multiple draws while a room waits, because that’s live manual editing of the thing everyone is watching.

Raflia runs multiple draws in one project, carries winner exclusion between them automatically, and reveals results on a fullscreen animated page built for a room. See the random winner picker, or join the waitlist and we’ll email you when Raflia opens.

Judging entries rather than drawing them? See how to judge a contest fairly.