Fair Giveaway Drawings With a Free Name Wheel

Every time I have run a giveaway, someone in the comments has asked whether the winner was picked fairly. Drawing names from a hat on camera is clumsy, and a number generator that just prints a result does not convince anyone. Now I use the spinning wheel I built for exactly this, Wheel of Names Picker, and those questions have mostly stopped. Here is how I set up a drawing with it, step by step.

Getting Your Entries Onto the Wheel

I copy the list of entrants from wherever they came from, usually a spreadsheet or a comment export, and paste it into the box next to the wheel. Each line becomes one slice. If someone entered twice and the rules allow it, I leave both lines in, because a duplicate line gets its own slice and doubles that person’s chance. If the rules say one entry per person, I clean up the list first. If you are drawing numbered tickets instead of names, you can paste the numbers in the same way.

Before spinning, I press Shuffle so the order on the wheel does not follow the order people entered. The odds stay the same either way, but viewers like seeing the names mixed up.

Making the Spin Easy for Viewers to Follow

For a livestream I switch the wheel to fullscreen so it fills the shared screen. I pick whichever of the eight pastel styles matches my stream colors, and late at night I turn on dark mode. The wheel ticks as it spins, which builds a bit of suspense, and confetti bursts out when it lands. If the ticking does not suit your setup, the sound button mutes it.

Spinning the Wheel and Keeping a Record

When I click Spin, the browser’s cryptographic random number generator picks the winner before the animation even begins. Every slice is the same size, so each entry has the same chance of winning, and nobody, including me, can know the result before the wheel stops. A popup shows the winning name, and the Results tab logs it with the time. When I am drawing several prizes, I press Spin again and the tab builds a numbered list, which I screenshot and post afterwards as proof.

Where the Entry List Is Stored

People sometimes ask me where their names go. The list stays in your own browser. The site saves it locally so it survives a refresh, and nothing on the wheel is sent to a server. When the giveaway is over, I press Clear and Clear results, and the data is gone.

Other Ways I Use the Wheel Spinner

Giveaways got me started, but the wheel has worked its way into the rest of my week. I use it for picking who presents first at work, choosing a game for family night, settling on dinner when nobody will commit, and splitting chores in a shared house. It runs on phones as well as computers, so I can pull it up anywhere, and it is available in 16 languages if your audience is international.

Set Up Your Own Drawing

If you have a giveaway coming up, give the wheel a try at wheelofnamespick.com. It is free with no sign-up, and your viewers will see exactly how the winner was chosen.