How to pick a random winner for your giveaway
The Random Winner Picker draws one or more winners from your pool of entries — fairly, transparently, and with proof you can share with your audience. This guide walks you through running your first draw, from collecting entries to announcing winners.
Every draw Raflia runs is cryptographically verifiable. When you publish your results, anyone can confirm the winners weren’t changed after the fact. That’s the difference between “trust us” and “here’s the proof.”
Before you start
You’ll need a project with some entries in it. Entries can come from a few places:
- An entry form — share a link or embed a form, and entries collect automatically.
- A CSV upload — import a list you already have (e.g. exported from another platform).
- Manual entry — add entries by hand for smaller giveaways.
You don’t need to decide your winner count or prizes before collecting entries — you can set all of that at draw time.
Step 1 — Add the Random Winner Picker to your project
Open your project and add a new tool, then choose Random Winner Picker.
A project can hold more than one tool. That matters if you’re running, say, a main prize draw and a separate runner-up draw — and it’s how Raflia keeps the same person from winning twice across draws (more on that below).
Step 2 — Set up your prizes
Add the prizes you’ll be awarding. Each winning position can be tied to a specific prize, so your first-drawn winner gets the grand prize, the next gets second prize, and so on.
Step 3 — Configure the draw
A few options shape how the draw works:
How many winners? Set the number of winners you want to draw.
Weighted entries (optional). By default every entry has an equal chance. If your giveaway rewards extra actions — say, an entry earns more weight for referring a friend — you can give entries different weights so heavier entries are more likely to win.
Allow the same person to win more than once? If one person has multiple entries, you can decide whether they can occupy more than one winning slot in this draw, or whether each person can win at most once.
Exclude previous winners. If you’ve already run another draw in this project, you can exclude anyone who already won, so prizes spread across more people. Raffle recognises the same person across draws even if they entered with different entries.
Step 4 — Preview, then run the draw
You can run a preview draw first to see how it works without committing. When you’re ready, finalise the draw.
Finalising runs a fresh, random selection and locks the result. Once finalised, the winners are recorded permanently — they won’t change if you later edit or add entries. This is what makes your results trustworthy: the winning record is sealed at the moment you draw.
Step 5 — Reveal the winners
Raflia includes an animated reveal you can play for your audience — a shuffle or countdown that builds suspense before showing each winner. You can play it live (on a screen, a stream, or a call) and replay it later from the public results page.
Step 6 — Manage your winners
After the draw, each winner moves through a simple workflow so you can track who’s been contacted and who’s claimed their prize:
- Pending — drawn, not yet contacted.
- Notified — you’ve reached out.
- Confirmed — the winner accepted.
- Fulfilled — the prize has been delivered.
You can also mark a winner as declined (they didn’t respond or turned the prize down) or disqualified (they broke the rules).
When a winner can’t accept — choosing a substitute
If a winner declines or is disqualified, you can select a substitute. For a random draw, Raflia suggests the next eligible entry in the original draw order — so the replacement is still determined by your original random draw, not hand-picked. The substitute inherits the same prize and starts as pending, ready for you to notify.
Because your original drawing record is sealed, choosing a substitute never rewrites history — the record still shows who was originally drawn and that they declined.
Step 7 — Publish and share your results
Publish a public results page that anyone can view. The page shows your winners and includes the cryptographic proof that the draw was fair and unaltered.
Protecting entrants’ privacy
You control how much of each winner’s identity is shown publicly. Choose from:
- Full — show the full name.
- Partial — show a partly masked name.
- Initials — show initials only.
- Hidden — don’t show the name at all.
You can set the privacy level for the public winners list and for the public entries list independently, so you can be more open about one than the other.
Times on the public page are shown in your organiser time zone, so your audience sees a consistent reference point.
A note on fairness
Raflia is built so that a draw can’t be quietly rigged or edited after the fact:
- The selection uses a secure random method, not a guessable one.
- Winners are sealed into an immutable record the moment you finalise — later edits to entries don’t change who won.
- The public results page carries a verifiable fingerprint of the draw, so anyone can confirm the outcome matches what was sealed.
That’s what lets you tell your audience, honestly, that the giveaway was fair — and back it up.
Common questions
Can I add more entries after I’ve drawn?
You can keep collecting entries, but a finalised draw won’t change — its winners are sealed. If you want those new entries included, run a new draw.
What if I need to draw again from scratch?
Add a new Random Winner Picker draw, or use the “exclude previous winners” option to draw fresh winners who haven’t won yet.
Can one person win twice?
Only if you allow it. The “allow the same person to win more than once” setting controls this within a single draw, and “exclude previous winners” controls it across draws.
Do entrants see each other’s details?
Only what you choose to publish, at the privacy level you set. You can keep the public entries list and the winners list as open or as private as you like.