Random picker for giveaways
Paste your entrant list, spin it on camera, and pick a winner your audience can see being picked. Draw a couple of backups in the same round for the winners who never answer their messages — which is most of them.
Running a giveaway people believe
The suspicion is the default. Every audience has watched a creator announce a winner nobody can find, and the only real defence is making the draw witnessable. Four things do almost all the work: publish the entry rules before entries open, freeze the list at a stated deadline, show the full list on screen immediately before spinning, and spin once.
Show the entrant list — actually on screen, scrolled through, not described. It is the step people skip and it is the one that matters, because it is what stops the reasonable objection that the winner was never in the list to begin with. A recording of a spin from a list nobody saw proves nothing at all.
Then spin once and keep the result. Re-rolling because the winner is a friend, or has a locked account, or won last time, is the thing that turns a fair draw into a rigged one, and audiences are extremely good at spotting the pause before the second spin.
Backup winners, drawn at the same time
Most giveaway winners never reply. Plan for it in the same session: with winner removal on, spin three times to get first, second and third place, announce the first and hold the other two. When the first winner has not answered after the window you published — forty-eight or seventy-two hours is normal — the prize moves to the second name, and you have a recording showing that name was drawn before anybody knew it would be needed.
Drawing the backup later, off camera, after the first winner goes quiet, puts you exactly back where you started. Nobody can tell that draw apart from picking a friend, because from the outside it is identical.
Cleaning the entrant list first
Export or copy your entrants into a column and paste it in. Blank lines are dropped, and spaces around each name are trimmed, so the usual export debris does not turn into empty slices on the wheel.
Duplicates are the real problem and the wheel deliberately does not touch them. Two identical handles stay as two slices, because the tool cannot know whether that is one person who entered twice through a loophole, or the legitimate result of a rule that gave extra entries for sharing. Deduplicate in your spreadsheet where you can see what you are removing, then paste.
If your rules give extra entries for actions — a follow, a tag, a share — either repeat the name once per entry, which is what your audience can verify by looking at the wheel, or use handle:3. Repeating is more convincing on camera. Weights are more practical past a few hundred entrants, where the slices are too thin to read anyway.
Common questions
How do I pick a giveaway winner fairly?
Publish the rules before entries open, freeze the list at the deadline, show the whole list on screen, and spin once on camera. Re-spinning after seeing a result is the thing that makes a draw unfair, and an audience will spot it.
What if the winner never replies?
Draw two or three backups in the same recorded session with winner removal on, announce only the first, and publish how long the winner has to respond. If they do not, the prize moves down the list you already drew on camera.
Should I remove duplicate entries?
Usually, and do it in your spreadsheet rather than expecting the wheel to guess. A repeated handle might be someone gaming the entry form or might be a legitimate bonus entry for sharing, and only you know which.