Run a draw your audience can trust
Fairness isn't a technicality when you're running a giveaway — it's the whole point. The people who entered are trusting you to pick honestly, and the ones who don't win are watching to decide whether it's worth entering the next one. A draw that looks rigged costs you the exact thing giveaways are meant to build: goodwill.
That's why this picker chooses the winner the moment you tap the button — before the confetti, before any reveal. When you press Draw the Winner, your browser's cryptographically secure random number generator (crypto.getRandomValues()) picks one entrant, and every single person on your list has exactly the same odds: 1 in however many entered. Compare that to the usual "I closed my eyes and scrolled the comments" method — which feels random but genuinely isn't. Human scrolling favours the top and bottom of a list, the newest comments, and whichever name your thumb happens to stop on. A real random number generator has no thumb and no favourites. Being able to say, truthfully, "a cryptographic RNG picked the winner, not me" is a far stronger claim than any amount of promising you were fair.
There's a practical payoff beyond the ethics of it, too. Giveaways people believe are fair get shared, re-entered and remembered — the folks who didn't win come back for round two. The ones that smell rigged get screenshotted and picked apart in the replies. A transparent draw isn't only the right thing to do; it's the version that actually grows the account you're running it for.
How to run the draw
The mechanics are fast — the whole tool is the box above and one button — but a good draw is as much about the receipts as the result. Here's the flow worth following:
- Get your entrants into one list. One entrant per line in the box above — handles, usernames, emails or order numbers, it doesn't matter which.
- Hit record. Start a screen recording before you draw. Ten seconds of footage is all the proof you'll ever need, and it doubles as your winner-announcement clip.
- Draw. Tap Draw the Winner. One name comes up, with a little confetti to mark the moment.
- Drawing more than one prize? After each winner comes up, delete their line from the box before you draw again — a quick edit that stops the same person winning twice and, done on camera, actually makes the draw look more above-board. Draw first, second, third, each from whoever's left. Prefer not to touch the list between prizes? The Pick Me app removes each winner automatically and can pick a whole batch of winners in one tap.
Nothing is saved between draws, so when you're finished you can just close the tab and the list is gone.
Getting entrants out of Instagram, TikTok and YouTube
The genuinely fiddly part of any giveaway isn't the draw — it's rounding up the entrants in the first place. There's no magic button, but here's what actually works:
- Small comment draws (a few dozen entries): just select and copy the comments by hand. Paste them in, delete the lines that aren't real entries, and you're done in a minute. For a giveaway with 40 comments this beats fighting with any tool.
- Form or link-in-bio entries: if you collected entries through a Google Form, Typeform or a landing page, export the responses to a spreadsheet and copy the name or email column straight into the box — a pasted column arrives one-per-line automatically.
- Order numbers: running a "every purchase this week is an entry" promo? Copy the order-number column from your store's export and draw against that. Winners stay anonymous until you look up whose number came up.
- The counting method: when you truly can't export a clean list — say all you have is "comment count: 812" — number your entries instead of naming them. Use our random number generator to pick a number between 1 and your entry count, then count down to that comment. It's a legitimate, transparent way to draw from a platform that won't hand you a list, and it's easy to show on camera.
For plain-list draws without any of the giveaway framing, the random name picker this tool is built on does the same job.
Multiple prizes and runner-ups
Two things separate a smooth giveaway from a messy one: never picking the same winner twice, and having a plan for when a winner ghosts.
The first takes about ten seconds by hand: after each winner is drawn, delete their handle from the box above before you draw the next prize. That alone guarantees first, second and third place go to different people, and making the edit on camera reads as more transparent, not less — everyone can see the pool shrink. Draw as many places as you have prizes. If you'd rather not touch the list between prizes, the Pick Me app removes each winner automatically and can draw a whole batch of winners at once — more on that below.
The second is just good practice. Winners disappear all the time — wrong account, missed the DM, entered for a laugh and forgot. Draw a couple of extra names as runner-ups while you're still recording, and announce a claim window up front. The convention most creators use is 48 hours: if the winner hasn't replied by then, the first runner-up steps up. Because you drew them in order, on camera, nobody can argue you picked a favourite when the prize rolled down the list.
If you're regularly handing out five or ten prizes in one go, drawing them a tap at a time starts to drag — and re-recording each pull is a chore. That's the point where drawing a whole batch of winners at once earns its keep, which is exactly what the app below does. For splitting entrants into groups rather than picking individuals — say a bracket or a squad challenge — the team generator shuffles everyone into balanced teams in one move.
Keep your giveaway legit
A full rundown of promotion law is beyond a free web tool, and this isn't legal advice — but the basics are simple and worth doing. Publish clear rules somewhere entrants can read them: how to enter, the deadline, who's eligible (age, country) and when you'll announce. If your region requires it, include a "no purchase necessary" line and a free alternative entry route. Most platforms also ask you to state that the giveaway isn't sponsored or endorsed by them. None of this is hard; it just needs to be written down before you start, not improvised after someone complains.
The reassuring part is that a transparent, recorded draw covers most of what those rules are really trying to protect: that everyone had a genuine, equal shot and that the result wasn't quietly steered. Get the fairness right and the paperwork is mostly just saying so out loud.
The professional giveaway kit
When giveaways become a regular part of how you grow, the web tool starts to feel manual — and that's exactly where Spin The Wheel — Pick Me for iPhone and iPad takes over. It draws from saved lists of up to 50,000 entrants, picks a whole batch of winners in a single tap instead of one at a time, and supports weighted entries so bonus actions (tagged a friend, shared to a story) can genuinely count for more without duplicating lines. It keeps a history of past draws — a quiet audit trail you can point back to weeks later — and removes winners automatically across a multi-prize draw. It's rated 4.6★ by more than 14,800 people, used by over 3 million, available in 26 languages, and it has never shown a single ad. For a creator running draws month after month, that's the difference between a party trick and a repeatable, defensible process.