Choosing Competition Winners

Gleam gives you full flexibility on how you choose winners for your competition. We base our winners around the number of prizes that you have allocated, so if you want to draw 10 winners please ensure you have 10 prizes against the competition you are drawing.

Winners are also assigned to a specific action that they have completed, you will see this when you announce winners in the widget.

Please note Gleam does not automatically contact the winners of your competitions.

Random Winners

When your competition finishes you will get a notification from Gleam asking you to choose your winners.

You can find ended competitions in the Finished tab of your site:

• Red shows Competitions that have not had winners drawn yet
• Blue shows Competitions that have had winners drawn but not announced publicly
• Green shows Competitions that have had winners drawn and announced publicly on the widget

If you go to your competition then the Winners tab you will have the option to start drawing winners.

You must ensure that you are drawing Winners for your campaigns in accordance with our Terms of Service, failure to do so can result in an account review or suspension.

Drawing Winners

When you select Draw Winners you simply have to decide the number of winners you want to draw (this cannot exceed the number of winners set for your campaign), specify if you want to restrict entries by date, and select Draw.

You will then be presented with the winning entry or entries, ready for you to announce and contact.

Drawing Multiple Winners for Multiple Prizes

If your Competition contains multiple prizes, you have the option to draw winners for 'All Prizes', or draw winners based on a specific prize.

If you choose to draw winners for 'All Prizes', the 1st winner drawn will be allocated the 1st prize in your list, the 2nd drawn will be allocated to the 2nd prize in your list, etc.

If you want to draw winners for a specific prize only, you need to select the prize from the dropdown list and choose how many winners you want to draw for that prize. This number cannot exceed the remaining number of winners for your selected prize.

Once you have drawn your winners you will be presented with the winning entries, ready for you to announce and contact.

If you would like to change the prize allocated to any winner for any valid reason you can do so from each winner's Prize status:

How Does The Random Draw Work

Gleam automatically uses Random.org to draw winners, they offer true randomness:

RANDOM.ORG offers true random numbers to anyone on the Internet. The randomness comes from atmospheric noise, which for many purposes is better than the pseudo-random number algorithms typically used in computer programs.

We currently draw winners based on actions, not unique entrants. This means that there is the potential for the same person to win more than once. If this happens you can invalidate the entry & repick that winner again.

Random.org has a number of certifications from different countries which you can view or request here.

Drawing Multiple Winners

To draw multiple winners, all you need to do is specify the number of winners you want to pick under Winners to Draw.

You will then be presented with the winning entries.

When you draw multiple winners, each winning entry will be numbered from 1 to the total number of winners that have been picked.

For example, if you draw 4 winners, the winning entries will be numbered from 1-4.

This makes it easy to handle major and minor prizes or rank winning entries from 1st to nth place.

Allow Repeat Winners

When drawing winners you can choose to Allow Repeat Winners.

Selecting this option will allow multiple entries from a single contestant to win prizes.

Daily / Weekly Winners

You don't have to wait until the competition is over to draw winners. In fact you can draw them at any time during the competition. This means if you have a competition that has 5 daily winners you can just visit the Winners tab to draw each day.

When you click Draw you can simply choose how many winners you want us to draw for you.

Business plans and above have a more granular control over winners by being able to choose a specific time or date range.

Manual Winners

You can also draw manual winners if your competition doesn't involve any element of randomness. This is perfect for game of skill competitions that we see regularly in Australia.

Gleam audits manual winner draws to ensure that this feature is being used appropriately and not to manipulate results.

Admin / Test Entries

If you are logged in as an admin we will automatically invalidate your own entries before a competition starts, this gives you time to test your entry methods without actually entering the competition.

One thing to note is that if you are testing an email provider integration you will need to make your own entries valid manually to test it.

Archiving Entries

There may be times when you need to run ongoing competitions that end at regular intervals, for example if you run a weekly competition.

Archive entries allows you to simply pick your winners each week, then archive all the entries for that content. Which means you essentially start fresh again (whilst still keeping the old data in the actions tab).

Example 52 Week Competition

Lets say you had a competition running for an entire year with weekly winners then 10 grand prizes at the end.

• Prizes: You would need to add 61 total prizes, weekly for 51 weeks then 10 prizes on the final draw.
• Date Range: Set the end date for the competition to the final draw date.

Each week you can then choose your winner & archive the existing entries. Essentially starting the contest again.

This functionality means that you wouldn't have to keep recreating the contest every week.

How Do I Deal With People Cheating?

Gleam has a number of ways to protect you from users cheating in your competitions. We have worked hard to ensure that this process should involve as little manual intervention as possible, however it depends on how thorough you want to be in checking entries.

Free Users

Once you pick a winner you'll be able to see all of the information and details about that user and their entries. This will allow you to do a final validation of their entries before awarding the win or deciding to repick.

On Pro and above you can access all entry data and validate or investigate entries prior to drawing winners.

Automatic Action Validation

Gleam integrates with a lot of different API's, we use these API's to validate that entrants have in fact completed what you have asked.

For example, a user can't complete a Tweet on Twitter without Twitter letting us know via the API it's successfully been done. Where possible, we also try to provide you URL's and links to the completed action in your Actions list (in-case you need to verify).

Manual Validation

There's cases where this isn't always possible too, for example with the Twitter Web Intent box - it can tell us that an entrant Tweeted, but for security reasons won't give us the URL of the Tweet. So we know it has been done, just not exactly what the exact Tweet is.

What About Users Deleting Their Posts?

Quite often users may delete one of their entries after completion. Unfortunately this isn't something we track, however it's an easy thing to manage.

You only really need to check valid entries when you are picking a Winner. Simply click the User icon next to the Globe icon and you can review all other entries from that winner (to ensure they've completed everything you asked).

If anything seems out of order you can revoke the win, invalidate the entries then repick another Winner.

Winner Invalidation

If you choose a winner but then realise that their entry is invalid for any reason you can invalidate & repick another winner. This is useful if perhaps you asked users to complete a certain task & they didn't complete it, or if the user subscribed to a mailing list but has unsubscribed when you checked again.

Automatic Fraud Protection

We use a number of techniques to detect fraudulent behaviour, this happens in real-time within ~5 minutes of an entry being received. This protection ensures that you will see reduced entry manipulation, plus you will not see those emails getting carried through to your 3rd party mailing lists.

If an action has been invalidated you will see the reason why in your actions list:

You will see the invalidated number of actions in the email we send you when the contest is over, you will also see them highlighted on the Reporting tab of your contest:

Note: x entries were invalidated due to suspicion of cheating.

How Good Is The Fraud Filter

We've been working on this for over a year now. It's been designed to be as non-intrusive for the end users as possible, whilst protecting your campaigns from spam (and saving you time).

The widget also has mechanisms in place to require extra layers of validation from users, if say for example lots of people are all entering from the same office at once.

How Does This Affect Users?

Users will not be aware if their actions are in invalid in the backend, they will still see that they have the full number of credited entries.

How Does This Affect My Reporting?

Invalid actions do not count towards your reporting on the Reporting tab.

You are shown exactly how many actions have automatically be flagged, then given the chance to manually review them yourself.

Why Does Gleam Not Provide IP Addresses Of Entrants?

We often get this particular question, and it relates to the privacy of our entrants.

Gleam is a free platform that allows anyone to collect data from their campaigns and attribute it to an email address. IPs on their own aren't dangerous, but once you start showing IP addresses that are linked to identifable user data they can be used maliciously. At Gleam we are very serious about protecting the data of our customers, but also the data of the entrants that enter competitions too.

We still provide a robust way to filter entries from the same IP address (without exposing the actual IP). Simply click the Globe icon next to any action and you'll see a comprehensive list of all other actions completed under that IP address. It'll even show actions that we've already marked as invalid.

Announcing Winners

Once you have chosen all your winners you can choose to announce them in the widget with or without avatars. We will never reveal the full name of the winner, just the first name & first letter of the surname.

Please note that once you announce winners in the widget you must unannounce them if you wish to invalidate or repick a winner.

Announcing Your Winners on Social Media

It's important to add a layer of legitimacy to your campaigns so that users can see that you are awarding prizes, it will increase overall trust and ensure your campaigns continue to be successful.

Considering announcing your Winners on social channels like Twitter, Facebook or Instagram with a simple post:

Then get your winners to pose or take photos with their prizes and link them on social media too: