Discord Giveaway Rules – Run Legal & Fair Campaigns

Running a giveaway on Discord is a fantastic way to drive traffic and promote your Discord server.

It's a great way to build excitement around your channel and drive meaningful engagement with your audience.

Unlike Twitter or Instagram, Discord doesn’t have strict, formal giveaway rules. Instead, you need to follow general gambling laws, community guidelines, and standard social media rules. Finding all the details can take some digging, but we’ve done the work for you.

When you run a giveaway on Discord, you must clearly state the eligibility requirements of your campaign, for example:

• Age requirements
• Entry requirements (e.g. how people enter)
• The duration of the giveaway
• Geographical restrictions
• Anybody who cannot enter (e.g. employees and their families).

When determining the entry requirements of your giveaway, try to encourage meaningful actions such as joining, boosting, or unlocking a role in your Discord server.

Just make sure you're avoiding false engagement such as:

• Incentivising Server raids
• Encouraging engagement in return for a financial reward
• Letting people create fake or bot accounts to enter the giveaway.

All entries and activities in your giveaway must comply with Discord's Community Guidelines.

This includes things like only encouraging respectful behaviour, disqualifying entries with inappropriate or illegal content, and not allowing spam or misuse of Discord.

Make sure entries also respect third-party rights, like copyrights, and prioritise user safety and privacy. Be clear in your rules that breaking these guidelines could result in disqualification.

If your giveaway is monetised, like being sponsored, you need to be 18+, follow Discord's Monetisation Policy, and have two-factor authentication enabled.

Failing to stick to these rules could result in penalties, so make sure everything’s set up properly.

When you run a promotional giveaway on Discord or any other platform, it's important to make sure you are complying with relevant local laws.

For more information on contest and giveaway laws in the US, you can read our helpful guide right here.

The most important laws you'll need to follow are No Purchase Necessary laws, which dictate that you cannot require entrants to make a purchase or provide other forms of consideration without offering a free alternate method of entry.

You need to be careful about ensuring data privacy and any personal or sensitive information you collect is not publicly displayed, like email addresses or phone numbers.

You also must gain the explicit consent of entrants if you want to use content they submit for your marketing purposes.

When running a contest or giveaway on Discord, you must clearly state how the winner will be drawn.

It is a good idea to use an automated tool like a 3rd party software such as Gleam, or a Discord giveaway bot to ensure a fair process, when you select manually, it isn't truly random.

Some popuar giveaway bots for discord are GiveawayBot, MEE6, and Dyno.

Similarly to using a platform like Geam, giveaway bots help ensure compliance by automating fair, random winner selection, preventing spam or fake entries, and keeping the process transparent.

It's also a good idea to clearly state the odds of winning and that a purchase will not increase the chances of winning.

There are also some guidelines you'll need to follow when choosing your prize to give away:

• You must not give away or promote tobacco, alcohol, or other regulated items.
• You should provide clear prize details including approximate retail value, location restrictions, and any additional costs the winner may incur e.g. taxes.

When you run a prize promotion such as a contest, giveaway or sweepstakes on Discord, it's important to provide entrants with terms and conditions they can read through.

To keep things simple, you can use the Discord Master Sweepstakes rules as a template to create clear, concise, and thorough terms and conditions.

Anytime you create terms and conditions for a giveaway, it's a good idea to include the following:

• A liability release to protect yourself and your team.
• A statement allowing you to disqualify entrants if necessary (e.g., for rule violations).
• A disclaimer stating that Discord is not affiliated with, responsible for, or involved in the giveaway. This mainly just prevents confusion and ensures participants direct any queries to you.
• Information about the winner selection process, including how the winer will be notified and the timeframe they need to claim their prize within.

To make your life easier, we’ve created a ready-to-use template that generates terms and conditions compliant with Discord’s rules, saving you time and effort.

Gleam simplifies everything from setup to winner selection with tools for fair, transparent draws, customised entry methods, and a dedicated hosted landing page for you to promote your campaign.

You’ll boost engagement, stay compliant with privacy laws, and run a smooth, hassle-free giveaway while you can focus on the fun parts.

Get started now:

There’s no single “best” way to run a Discord giveaway. What works depends on how established your server is, how active your community already feels, and what outcome you actually care about at the end.

The mistake many servers make is defaulting to the easiest format without thinking about the trade-offs. Every giveaway format optimises for something different, whether that is reach, engagement, quality, or speed.

Simple entry giveaways are the lowest-friction option. They usually involve one clear action and one entry, which makes them easy to understand and quick to participate in. These work well when the goal is visibility, announcements, or general awareness, especially if the prize value is relatively modest.

The downside is that low friction attracts a broad audience. That can include people who have little interest in your server beyond the prize itself. Keeping entry methods limited and expectations clear helps avoid turning these campaigns into noise.

Engagement-based giveaways introduce a small amount of effort in exchange for higher-quality participation. Asking entrants to join your server, unlock a role, or complete a small task tends to filter out users who are not genuinely interested. These formats are particularly effective when you want to reward existing members or encourage light but meaningful interaction.

Skill-based contests shift the focus away from chance entirely. Instead of a random draw, winners are chosen through judging or voting. Caption contests, creative submissions, or community votes often result in fewer entries overall, but far higher quality participation. Because the winner is selected on merit, these formats usually feel more satisfying to participants and easier to explain internally.

Time-limited giveaways are best used deliberately. Short campaigns can create urgency around launches, events, or announcements, but only when setup is kept simple. Too many entry methods or unclear timing quickly undermine the effect. When attention is concentrated in a narrow window, clarity matters more than creativity.

The strongest Discord giveaways are not the most complex ones. They are the ones where the format matches the goal and the effort asked of entrants feels fair relative to the prize.

Promotion is where many Discord giveaways succeed or quietly fall flat. Even a well-structured giveaway will struggle if people do not see it, but over-promotion can be just as damaging.

The safest place to start is your announcements or updates channel. Posting the giveaway there sets expectations and avoids interrupting ongoing conversations. A strong announcement clearly explains what the prize is, when the giveaway ends, how to enter, and where the official rules live.

Pinning the announcement or updating the channel topic can improve visibility without repeated posting. These small steps often perform better than sending multiple messages across different channels.

Reminder posts can be effective, but restraint is important. Most users will not enter the first time they see a giveaway, so a reminder partway through the campaign and a short final reminder near the end are usually sufficient. Reposting too frequently or repeatedly tagging everyone can quickly feel spammy and damage trust.

If growing your server is part of the goal, promoting the giveaway outside Discord can help bring in new entrants. Sharing the same hosted giveaway page across social posts, newsletters, or your website keeps entry instructions consistent and avoids fragmented entry experiences.

Once the giveaway ends, closing the loop matters. A short update confirming that entries are closed and that winners will be announced reassures participants and sets a clear endpoint.

Many Discord giveaways underperform not because the idea is bad, but because the structure is unclear or the promotion feels noisy.

When formats are chosen deliberately and promotion is handled with restraint, giveaways are easier to understand, easier to trust, and easier to manage. Fewer entry methods, clearer messaging, and realistic expectations almost always outperform overly complex setups.

Strong giveaways feel intentional rather than rushed. Over time, that consistency turns them from one-off incentives into a reliable way to support community growth without undermining trust.