How to Run a Fair Giveaway: 7 Steps with a Random Name Picker

A giveaway lives or dies on trust. If your audience suspects the winner was a friend's cousin, the campaign costs you credibility instead of earning it. This seven-step playbook uses a random name picker wheel to make every draw transparent, verifiable and genuinely exciting to watch.

Step 1: Publish clear rules before you open entries

State who can enter, how to enter, what the prizes are, when the draw happens and how winners will be contacted and announced. Pin it. Rules written after entries close look like rules written to fit an outcome.

Step 2: Collect entries into one clean list

Export comments, form responses or tagged posts into a single list — one line per entry. Paste it into the giveaway winner picker and use Dedupe if each person should count once. If every action should count separately, leave duplicates in: three entries, three lines, three times the odds.

Step 3: Weight bonus actions honestly

Bonus entries for shares or tags are fine — if the math is visible. Weight syntax like @janedoe [3x] gives three times the slice and three times the odds, and the wheel displays exactly that. Entrants can literally see their slice. That's the transparency no hidden spreadsheet can match.

Step 4: Enable no-duplicate winners

Multi-prize draws need Remove winner mode. Each winner leaves the wheel before the next spin, so the same person can't take first and second prize — the most common small-giveaway scandal, eliminated by one toggle.

Step 5: Spin in public

Go live, or record your screen. Fullscreen the wheel, let it tick down, and let the confetti land. The slow-down is not just theater — it is the moment your audience verifies with their own eyes that nobody clicked a name.

Step 6: Publish the evidence

Screenshot the winner popup and the Results list. Post them with the announcement. For extra credit, share the wheel link itself so entrants can load the exact slice layout that was drawn from.

Step 7: Contact winners the way you said you would

Use the contact method from your rules, give a clear claim deadline, and pre-plan what happens to unclaimed prizes (a redraw with the same wheel works perfectly). Consistency here is what turns one giveaway into an audience that enters the next ten.

Frequently asked questions