How to run a fair online raffle or prize draw

A raffle is only worth winning if everyone trusts the way the winner was drawn.

Raffles and prize draws turn up everywhere: a charity fundraiser, an office Christmas hamper, a giveaway for newsletter subscribers, a school fête. The mechanics are simple — collect entries, pull out a winner — but the part that matters is trust. If anyone in the room suspects the draw was nudged, the prize loses its shine and so does your reputation as the organiser. The good news is that running a genuinely fair draw is mostly about being organised and being visible, not about clever tricks.

This guide walks through it end to end: building a clean entry list, deciding between equal and weighted odds, drawing winners out in the open, handling several prizes without anyone winning twice, dealing with no-shows, and keeping a simple record afterwards.

Start with a clean entry list

Everything downstream depends on getting your entries into one tidy list, with one row per entry. How you build that list depends on how tickets were sold or earned, but the principle is the same: each row is one chance in the draw.

If people could buy or earn more than one ticket, you have two honest ways to represent that:

• Duplicate entries. Someone with three tickets appears on three separate rows. This is the most transparent approach — the list literally shows that they have three chances, and anyone can count it.
• Weighting. Someone with three tickets appears once but with three times the chance. This keeps the list shorter for big raffles, but the extra chances are no longer visible at a glance, so you have to make the weighting obvious in another way (more on that below).

For a small draw, typing or pasting names straight into a spin wheel is usually quickest. For a larger raffle where entries already live in a spreadsheet, the Spin Sheet row picker lets you import a CSV, XLSX or Google Sheets export and pick a winning row directly — so you never have to retype hundreds of names, and the picked row keeps all its detail (ticket number, contact, and so on).

Equal draws vs. weighted draws

Decide up front which kind of draw you are running, because it changes how you build the list:

• Equal draw. Every entrant has exactly the same chance. This is right when everyone paid the same, or each person could only enter once.
• Weighted draw. More tickets means a bigger chance — five tickets gives five times the odds of one. This is fair, provided the weighting is agreed and visible.

The word that does the work there is visible. Weighting only feels fair when people can see it. On a spin wheel, give a name a larger slice and the bigger chance is obvious — a wider slice plainly means better odds. If you prefer the duplicate-entries method instead, the wheel or sheet simply shows the same name several times, which is just as clear. Either way, avoid hidden multipliers that only you understand; that is exactly what makes a draw feel rigged.

Draw the winners out in the open

A fair method still has to look fair. A winner pulled in private invites doubt no matter how honest you were, so put the whole draw in front of the people it affects:

1. Show the entry list first. Let people see that all the entries are in and the cut-off has passed before anything spins. Surprises after the result are what start arguments.
2. Spin on a shared screen. Put the wheel or sheet on a projector, a screen everyone can see, or a stream, so the motion and the landing happen in plain view.
3. Announce as it lands. Call the winner the moment the wheel stops, rather than reading a name off afterwards. The visible spin is the proof.

If your entrants are not all in the same room — an online community, a remote team, subscribers scattered everywhere — a SpinKit live room lets everyone watch the same draw at the same moment, so a remote raffle carries the same weight as one done on a stage.

Multiple prizes and no duplicate winners

Most raffles have more than one prize, and the usual rule is that nobody should win twice. The simplest way to guarantee that is to remove each winner from the list as soon as they are drawn, then draw the next prize from what is left. SpinKit lets you remove the winner with a single tap after a spin, so you can run straight through a list of prizes without editing names by hand between draws.

Whether you draw the biggest prize first or last is entirely up to you — it is a presentation choice, not a fairness one. Drawing the headline prize last builds suspense and keeps people watching to the end; drawing it first gets the big moment out of the way early. Neither changes anyone's odds. Just pick one, say which you are doing, and stick to it.

Handling reserves and no-shows

Winners are not always present, and sometimes a winner turns out to be ineligible or simply does not claim the prize. Plan for it before it happens: draw a couple of extra names as reserves for each prize, in order. If the first name drawn can't be reached or doesn't respond by your deadline, the prize rolls to the first reserve, then the second.

Say this rule out loud before you start — for example, "if a winner isn't claimed within seven days, it passes to the next name drawn." Deciding the backup order live, in the same visible draw, is far more convincing than quietly choosing a replacement later.

Keep a simple record

Once the draw is done, write the result down so there is no ambiguity afterwards. You don't need anything elaborate:

• Screenshot or note each winner (and reserves) as they are drawn.
• Record the prize each winner was matched to.
• Be clear about the entry cut-off time — state when entries closed, and make sure the list you drew from reflects exactly that. A draw that uses entries added after the deadline is one of the easiest ways to lose people's trust.

A quick raffle routine

Put together, a clean prize draw looks like this:

1. Close entries at your stated cut-off and build one tidy list — one row per entry, with duplicates or weighting set if some people have more chances.
2. Load the list into a wheel, or import a bigger list into the Spin Sheet.
3. Show the entry list to everyone and confirm the count.
4. Spin in full view, and announce each winner as it lands.
5. Remove each winner before drawing the next prize so nobody wins twice.
6. Draw a reserve or two per prize for no-shows.
7. Screenshot or note the winners, and you're done.

None of this is complicated, but doing it openly is what turns "trust me, it was random" into a result the whole room watched happen.