Raffles, drawings, contests - whatever you may choose to call them, programs where users earn a chance at a large reward are a great way to incentivize engagement while also managing your program expenses.
Raffles can be run as standalone programs or included as part of a larger Commuter Store program design.
Point Programs are a great tool for managing ongoing programs where users can earn points that they can use towards a wide variety of raffles and drawings.
In particular, Point Programs let you set up an ongoing program that may run for months or even years with multiple raffle options users can spend their points towards.
Raffle Program Design Strategies
Monthly Drawings
Set up your Point Program to span a long period - for example a quarter, semester, year, or even multiple years into the future.
Then, create individual inventory items for each month you want to conduct a drawing. Using the availability date settings on the inventory item to control when users can claim the item.
Users can chose to use all their points every month to purchase tickets for that month's drawing, or they can choose to bank their points for a few months and spend them all at once to try too increase their odds.
Single Tickets with Multiple Reward Selections vs. Multiple Ticket Options
With raffles you can decide whether to have a single type raffle entry invenory item that you then draw multiple winners for multiple prizes from, or to run multiple parallell inventory items, each one for a particular prize.
For example, you could have 1 "March Sweepstakes" ticket option where you plan to select a random $250 prize winner, 5 $50 winners, and 10 winners who get a cool new water bottle. OR you could have 3 ticket options, "March Sweepstakes - 1 x $250", "March Sweepstakes - 5 x $50", and "March Sweepstakes - Water Bottles". You can even choose different costs for the entries into the different drawings.
In the first scenario, each user entry gets them a chance at any of the prizes, and in the second scenario the user can choose which prize they're trying to win.
Setting Up Inventory Items for a Raffle
We cover general Point Program design and setup in another article, so here we're going to focus on setup tasks specific to raffles.
Here's an example inventory item we'll use to walk through the most common configuration options:
You'll need to give each inventory item a unique name. This will help users know what they're spending their points on, and it will help you when it comes time to select winners.
It's entirely up to you if you want to limit users to a maximum number of entries using the Limit Per User feature.
Most programs use a cost per raffle entry of 1 point, but if you're running parallel raffles where you want entry into the more valuable raffle to cost more this is where to do so.
Depending on how you will issue your raffle rewards you can either use the standard Self-Managed Delivery, which automatically allows users to claim multiple entries per transaction, or you can select a digital inventory workflow that's been set up to issue rewards based on selecting different claim states.
If you're using a digital inventory item you should select "Allow users to claim more than one per transaction" - an option designed specifically for use with raffles and drawings.
If you're conducting monthly drawings select the dates when users should be allowed to purchase their entries.
Setting Up Digital Inventory Workflows for Raffles
As mentioned above, Digital Inventory workflows configured with multiple claim states area powerful way to issue rewards to your raffle winners.
For raffles with only one prize: Create your digital inventory workflow with state like "$25 Winner" that automatically issues a Tango reward, issues a unique code, and/or sends the user an email letting them know they won.
For raffles with multiple prizes: You can use a single digital inventory workflow with multiple states for different prizes. This will allow you to conduct multiple subsequent drawings using the raffle picker and select different prizes for each batch of winners.
Claiming Raffle Entries
When viewing a point program in the rewards area a user will see your raffle entry item in the available items area:
After selecting the item the user can choose how many entries they want to purchase, up to the maximum per-item or their current point balance.
Each entry a user purchases will increase their odds of winning, so if a user purchases a quantity of 92 they will have that many chances to win.
Picking Raffle Winners
Now for the fun part! Open your Point Program report page and open the random winner picker.
Select the inventory item that you want to use to select your winners.
In most cases you will want to select "Purchased" as the eligible claim state. This is the state all claims begin with. All inventory items have a purchased and cancelled status - other statuses may differ based on whether you are using Digital Inventory states.
Select your desired Number of Winners and click "Generate Winners."
You'll see stats on how many users were eligible based on your criteria along with how many total entries were claimed.
The winners list lets you preview the users that were selected by the random generator, along with certain user information that may be helpful for auditing those winners.
Depending on how you intend on fulfilling your winners, you may find it helpful to download this list using the export button.
If for some reason you need to generate a different list of winners, just select Generate Winners again and a new list will appear.
Rewarding Raffle Winners
Once you've reviewed your winners you can select a new status to assign to those users' claims.
Note that if a user has made multiple separate purchases of the same inventory item only one will be updated to the new status, to ensure reward automations are not triggered multiple times.
You will receive a notification when the statuses have been updated.
You can then use the winner picker to select another round of winners to issue a different prize to, or you can close the window.
Frequently Asked Questions
How are a user's chances of winning calculated?
A user's chance of being selected as a winner is based on the quantity of the selected inventory item that user has purchaced. For example, a user that has purchased 20 of an inventory item is twice as likely to be selected as someone that has purchased 10.
Can a user be selected more than once?
Users in a given list of winners will always be unique.
Someone was selected as a winner that should not be eligible - how do I exclude them?
If a user appears in the winners list that should not have been eligible, close the winner picker, look them up in the claims area of the point program report, and cancel their purchase(s) of that item. If they should not be eligible for the program at all, you should also remove them from the eligible network or add them to an exclusion network, in addition to cancelling their purchase.
What happens if I ask for more winners than are eligible?
The tool will only ever pick the number of eligible users. For example, if you have 98 users that have purchased the item you're using to pick winners, and you ask for 100 winners, all 98 eligible users will appear in your winners list.
I forgot to export the winner list from the picker tool - can I find that list again?
If you just closed the picker window and have not reloaded the page, re-open the winner picker and your list should still be there.
If you have set a winner status for the winners you picked using the tool you can type in that status into the search bar of the point program report claims area to find users with that status. You can also use the "Export Purchases" report to download all purchases from the program and filter to the specific combination of item name and state that correspond with your winners.