How To Pick A Winner For A Giveaway (the Easy Way)

Do you want to learn how to pick a winner for a giveaway?

Choosing a giveaway winner can be the most fun part of running a contest. After all, you get to break the great news to the chosen one.

But if you haven’t planned, it can be pretty stressful. How do you choose just one giveaway winner out of the hundreds who entered?

Don’t stress!

Today we’ll share how to pick a winner for your giveaway using free giveaway winner pickers, so you can get that warm, fuzzy feeling from breaking the exciting news.

Here are the 6 best ways to pick contest winners randomly and with intention:

Table of Contents

Shall we get started?

TLDR: To select a winner for a giveaway, randomly pick from entries, choose based on post comments, mix Comments/Likes, filter by correct answers, or decide through vote count, ensuring fairness and engagement.

How to Pick a Winner for a Giveaway

Below we’ll outline the best ways to pick a giveaway winner. If you’re in a hurry, you can start by watching the video below.

1. Choose a Random Giveaway Winner (Raffle Winner Generator)

Sometimes the easiest way to pick a winner from giveaway entrants is the best way. For that, we suggest using a random winner generator.

There are plenty of websites with:

• Giveaway winner picker tools
• Random number generators
• Random comment pickers

You can also use random name pickers to pick a giveaway winner randomly from a list of names.

All you need to do is enter the names of the people who entered, and they’ll pick a winner randomly for you.

However, with RafflePress, the best way to create an online giveaway, you use the built-in random winner generator option. This will save you the hassle of collecting all the names, adding them into a spreadsheet or CSV template, and manually putting them in a 3rd-party name generator.

Let’s look at how to randomly select a winner in RafflePress with the random winner generator.

When your giveaway has ended, head to RafflePress » Giveaways to see your list of contests.

Next, you’ll see a page with a list of everyone who entered your giveaway. Click the Pick Winner button to start choosing a winner.

You’ll be asked how many contest winners you’d like to pick, along with selecting winners with a verified or unverified email address.

When you’re done, click Choose Winners Now.

RafflePress’s giveaway winner picker will select a random winner for you. So now all you need to do is click Email Winner to give them the good news.

Now you know how to select a winner right inside WordPress randomly. You can use this solution for any giveaway, whether on your Facebook page, YouTube video, or any other social media platform.

But what if your contest is a little more complicated and needs more input to draw a winner? Don’t fret. We’ve got more solutions coming up.

Let’s say you’re running a photo contest with an Instagram post, and you’d like to pick a winner from the best submissions. For that, you can choose the winner with the most votes.

2. Pick a Winner With the Most Votes

A smart way to get your community involved would be to let them vote for their favorite submission. When the contest comes to an end, the photo with the most votes can be chosen as the winner.

There are many ways to run a giveaway based on image submissions, but it’s important to remember certain things you should avoid when collecting votes for the winning submission.

For example, if you’re running Facebook or Instagram giveaway, you’re not allowed to require your followers to like, share, or tag a post in exchange for entries.

One way to avoid this is to host your giveaway on your own website or blog and then have your community comment with their favorite submission.

Alternatively, you could insert an interactive poll in your giveaway post, so visitors can instantly vote for their winner.

This removes the need to manually draw a winner from random comments or an Instagram comment picker. It can also increase the amount of time people spend on your site and reduce your bounce rate.

To go a step further, you can build a poll right into your giveaway by using the RafflePress Polls & Surveys action.

Simply go to Actions » Polls & Surveys and click to add it to your RafflePress widget. You can add as many poll choices as you’d like, perfect for voting contests with lots of submissions.

Here’s what it would look like to your visitors.

What if your giveaway has a question people need to answer correctly to enter your prize draw? We’ll cover that next.

3. Filter Entries by Correct Answer

Many contests ask that people answer a question correctly, for instance, in their Instagram comments, to be in with a chance of winning a prize.

In this instance, an easy way to pick a winner is to filter all entries by the correct answer. This eliminates those with wrong answers, leaving you with a list of correct entries to draw a winner from.

In RafflePress, you can easily filter entries with the wrong answer using the random winner generator. Let’s take a quick look at how to do this.

Head to RafflePress » Giveaways to see your giveaways overview. Then hover your mouse cursor over the giveaway you want to see the entrants for and click Users.

Next, you’ll see a list of people who have entered your contest. Under each user, hover your cursor until you can see additional options.

Click Show Entries to view their entry details.

Now you can see the answer they gave to your giveaway question. If the answer is wrong, you can mark the entry as invalid, and if it’s correct, you can mark it as valid, as shown below.

RafflePress will only choose randomly from entries with valid answers when you use the random generator to pick a winner.

4. Pick a Winner from Verified Emails

Running any giveaway can attract spam and people who are only interested in a quick freebie. The problem with this is that it reduces genuine users’ chances of winning.

That’s why it’s a good idea to ask users to verify their email when entering your giveaway. If you know their email address is real and in use, you know they’re real people and not spambots.

Then when it comes to choosing a winner, you can filter the entries by those with verified emails.

Luckily, RafflePress makes this easy.

When setting up your giveaway, click the Settings tab and the Email Verification heading.

Then you can switch the toggle to the on position, so users must verify their email to confirm their identity and secure a valid entry.

When you’re ready to choose a winner for your giveaway, you need to select the checkbox that says Only Verified emails can win. Then click the Choose Winners Now button.

5. Pick Multiple Giveaway Winners

What if you have more than one prize to give away? The logical answer to that question is to pick more than one giveaway winner.

As we highlighted earlier, doing this with RafflePress’s random generator is as simple as drawing a random winner.

When randomly choosing a winner, enter the number of winners you’d like. Then click Choose Winners Now.

Now you can email each winner to give them the good news. Simple as that!

6. Let a Panel of Judges Decide

Not every contest is straightforward. Larger giveaways with thousands of people entering take a lot of planning and organizing. And if they include a highly specific entry method, like:

• Creating a piece of art
• Giving a performance
• Having the best website in a specific niche

Then it’s probably best that you have a panel of experts select a winner for you. This is largely down to there being more than one set of criteria for choosing a giveaway winner.

Having a group of people decide for you takes the guesswork out. Plus, it’ll mean the person chosen is a worthy winner in the end.

The Unsplash Awards are a great example of an expert judging panel. In these awards, the experts choose winning photography from thousands of entrants for a set number of themes.

With so many great photos, we don’t envy making those decisions! Why not try something similar for your next YouTube giveaway?

For more inspiration, check out these YouTube giveaway examples.

Frequently Asked Questions

That’s it!

Today we’ve covered the many ways you can learn how to pick a giveaway winner. In our opinion, RafflePress’s random winner picker is the easiest solution for WordPress. All that’s left is to set up your contest and enjoy the community buzz it creates.

But before you get too far ahead with the planning, you might want to think about what prize you’ll offer. Here are some great giveaway prize ideas your audience will love.

While you’re at it, don’t forget to follow our YouTube Channel for a range of helpful video tutorials. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter.

Stacey Corrin Writer

Stacey has been writing about WordPress and digital marketing for over 10 years and on other topics for much longer. Alongside this, she's fascinated with web design, user experience, and SEO.

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