Prize draws

Group admins Business

A raffle at the end of a session, a members’ draw for the whole team, or a draw among everyone who answered a poll. The options and the result are saved, so reopening a draw shows what happened rather than offering to run it again.

Starting a draw

For one session: open the occurrence and choose Prize draw from the three-dot menu, directly below Check-in. A session’s draw opens when the session starts and closes a week later — it cannot be run in advance, because a raffle drawn before anyone arrives is drawn from a guest list rather than a room.
For the whole team: open the team, go to the Admin tab and choose Prize draws. That screen lists every draw the team has run, at any scope, newest first, and the button starts a new team-wide one. A session can hold one draw; a team can run as many as it likes.
For a poll: open the poll and choose Prize draw from its three-dot menu. The contestants are everyone who answered the poll and is still a member — one ticket each, no guests — whether the poll was about a session or the whole team. The draw can be run from the moment the poll is published until a week after it closes, and it can be scheduled for the moment the poll closes. A poll holds one draw. An anonymous poll cannot have one: a winner is named to the whole team, and an anonymous poll promised the opposite.
For a session or a poll, from the Admin tab: the form that button opens leads with Link to event or poll. Pick something there and the draw becomes that session’s or that poll’s — the same contestants, guests and window as one started from the session or the poll itself. The list offers the sessions that can be drawn now (anything that started within the last week) first, then those still to come, which can only be scheduled for, then the polls still open, then those closed within the last week. Anything that already has a draw or a scheduled one, and any anonymous poll, is shown with the reason and cannot be picked. The × on the row makes it a team draw again.

Scheduled draws that have not run yet sit above the history. The filter icon in the top-right corner narrows the screen by scope — team-wide, per event or per poll — or to just the Scheduled or Completed draws.

Setting it up

Contestants and Include guests come first: they decide the size of the hat, which is what everything below is measured against.
Number of prizes — never more than the number of contestants, so the list shortens by itself when the pool is small.
Specify prizes — optionally name what each prize is. Switch it on and a field per prize appears; every prize needs a name, up to 30 characters, before the draw can start. Named prizes are shown with their placing wherever the result appears — on stage, on the printed sheet and in the announcement — and the switch remembers what you typed if you turn it off and on again.
Contestants — for a session, everyone who said IN, or only those confirmed present at the door. For a team, all members, or only those who said IN to something in the last 90 days. Members who have set themselves Hidden in this team are left out of every pool and marked as such in the exclusion picker: a winner is announced by name, and there is no way to hand somebody a prize on a stage they have asked to be off. The pool counts shown here are already net of them, so the hat is never smaller than it looked.
Exclude members — below the contestants choice, opens a searchable picker of the people in the pool. An excluded person cannot win, and their guest tickets go with them; the setup then says how many — 2 excluded, say. A re-draw starts with the previous exclusions already ticked.
Include guests — appears only when the session allows guests. Each guest is a ticket in their own right, so somebody who brought two guests holds three tickets and can win on more than one.
Draw delay — how long the screen pauses between one placing and the next, so the room has a moment to react. The slider runs from Instant, which reveals every winner at once, through one to ten seconds, to Manual at the far end, where the stage waits for you to press for each placing.
Fireworks — a burst of fireworks over first prize. Switch it on and a Fireworks duration slider appears below it, from 5 to 15 seconds. The switch sits above the first-prize group rather than inside it: the fireworks land on first prize, but nothing in that group turns them on or off.
Result view — Bottom-Top prints the numbered list up front and fills it in from the bottom, and Push down starts empty and pushes each new winner in above the last.
Suspense on the next placing — while the room waits, the placing about to be drawn flickers through names until the winner lands. Off keeps the list still, Contestant names flickers through the people in the draw, Fake names through one of your fake name lists, and Mix puts the contestants and a fake name list in one hat. Choosing Fake names or Mix shows a Fake name list picker. Both stay greyed out until the team has a fake name list, and the line under them says where to make one. The choice only appears when there is a pause to fill — not at Instant or Manual.

Under Extra 1st prize options:

Extra draw delay — No, Double, or Triple the draw delay before the top prize. It has nothing to act on at either end of the delay slider — Instant has no pause to multiply, and Manual waits for a press instead — so it goes inert rather than disappearing at those two settings.
Animated countdown — a 3-2-1 countdown before first prize, with a Countdown length slider from 3 to 10 seconds once it is on. The countdown is added to the pause before first prize rather than carved out of it, so the room still gets the full delay to read who won second place before the drum roll starts. The switch is always available: turning it on when the delay is shorter simply makes the wait longer.

Under Notifications:

Notify the winners — each winner gets a push notification naming the prize they won. It follows their own notification settings, so anyone who has muted this team or turned event notifications off hears nothing.
Add group announcement — posts the result to the team’s announcements, naming every placing. It stays there until a member dismisses it or an admin deletes it, and a re-draw takes it down again. The post goes through the team’s ordinary announcements, so a team whose plan does not include announcements — or that has switched them off in group settings — simply gets no post; the draw itself runs and is saved either way.
Notify the team — appears only once the announcement above is on, and goes down with it. It pushes the announcement to everyone who has not muted the team, leaving out the winners already told by Notify the winners, so nobody hears about the same result twice.

Fake name lists

The Fake name lists button at the top of Prize draws opens the team’s saved lists of made-up names for the suspense flicker. Each list has a name and 2 to 50 different names, and a team can keep up to 50 lists. A draw keeps its own copy of the names it used, so editing or deleting a list never changes how an earlier draw replays.

If the names already sit in one of the team’s Answer option lists under Polls, Use a list on the fake name list form fills the rows from it: pick the list, then the options to take. Names already on the form are skipped, and the button only shows once the team has an answer option list.

Drawing at a scheduled time

Under Save options at the foot of the setup screen you can pick Draw at a scheduled time instead of drawing now, and set the moment. For a session that moment has to fall inside the session’s draw window. Opening the draw for a session that has not started yet is the usual way in: the notice at the top says the draw is not open, and the Draw at a scheduled time button beside it puts the form straight into scheduling, at a moment just inside the window. Nobody is told anything until it runs, and the winners are picked then — there is nothing to leak in the meantime. A pending draw waits on the prize draws screen with Edit and Cancel scheduled draw.

Beneath the schedule sits Add new members to the draw — Add new participants to the draw for a session — which decides who is in the hat when the moment arrives:

On (the default) sweeps for contestants again as the draw runs. Anyone who has become eligible in the meantime joins the hat, and anyone who no longer qualifies drops out of it. On a team draw that cuts both ways: eligibility for Active members is a rolling 90 days, so a member who says IN to nothing between now and the draw can fall out of their own raffle.
Off freezes the pool as it stands on this screen. The draw runs against exactly the people listed here — nobody added, nobody dropped — which is what you want when the list is the point, for instance a raffle among the people who turned up to one session. The only exception is somebody who leaves the team altogether before the draw: they lose their ticket either way.

With it off, the pool counts and the prize limit on this screen are final, so an empty pool stops you scheduling in the first place rather than failing quietly on the night. Re-opening a frozen schedule to edit it freezes it again against the pool as it stands then.

Running it

Press Continue, then Start the draw. Placings appear from the last prize up to the first, which is why the pause before first prize is the one that grows. First prize is shown largest, then second, then third. When the prizes are named, each placing takes two lines: the prize in smaller italics on top, the winner’s name in the large type beneath it — and in the Bottom-Top view the prizes are on screen from the start, so the room can see what is at stake.

The winners are decided the moment the draw starts and saved immediately, so a phone that locks or a call that comes in loses the animation and nothing else.

Afterwards

The three-dot menu on the result offers:

Re-draw — deletes the result and returns to the setup screen. The previous winners are gone, so a room that has already been told who won has to be told again; the confirmation below handles that.
Print result — a printable sheet with the same heading as the check-in code and every placing, ready to print or share.
Delete prize draw — removes the result for good and closes the screen.

Both confirm with a single tap while the draw has told nobody anything. Once the winners have their notification, or the result has been announced to the team, the confirmation asks for more. It spells out what those people are left holding — the notification they already have cannot be taken back — and then collects what puts it right:

Reason — required. It goes into every message the withdrawal sends, so write something the winners can actually make sense of.
Notify the winners — everyone the draw picked hears that the result no longer stands, with your reason. A re-draw says the draw is being run again instead, so nobody is left thinking the whole thing is off.
Post an announcement — a fresh announcement tells the team the same thing. It stands in for the announcement the result posted, which comes down either way, and it expires after a week.

Each switch starts on for the channel the draw actually used, and at least one has to stay on: a result people were told about should not be able to vanish in silence. Then type REDRAW or DELETE to confirm.

Withdrawing a draw is never blocked by your plan, even though running one needs Business. A team whose plan has lapsed with a result still standing is exactly the team that needs to take it back.

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Prize draw result showing three placings with the first prize in the largest type.