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How to run an online raffle

Free draw, ticketed raffle or licensed lottery — different things with different rules. This guide sorts out which one you are running, then covers tickets, the draw itself, and the record that keeps a fundraiser’s trust.

Written and maintained by SpinRondo · last reviewed

Raffle, prize draw or lottery — which are you running?

The line that matters almost everywhere is payment. A free prize draw — enter by commenting, no purchase — is lightly regulated in most places. The moment tickets are sold, most jurisdictions call it a lottery or raffle and regulate who may run one, usually reserving it for licensed operators, registered charities or small societies.

This page is not legal advice, and the honest version of the advice is short: if money changes hands for a chance to win, check your local rules before you post, not after. Fundraising bodies publish plain-language guidance for exactly this question, and the search that finds yours takes five minutes.

A decision tree for online raffles: if entry is free it is a prize draw with published terms; if entry costs money, licensing rules apply before anything is sold
The line that matters almost everywhere is payment — the answer decides which rules you are under.

How do you sell or assign tickets online?

Number them, and let the number be the entry. A spreadsheet with one row per ticket — number, name, how it was paid or earned — is the entire infrastructure a small raffle needs, and the numbered ticket is what makes the draw checkable afterwards.

Close sales before the draw and publish the range. “Tickets 1 to 240, list closed at noon” is one sentence, and it removes the most common suspicion — that entries kept arriving until the right person could win. An entrant who knows the range can check that their number was in the draw.

How do you run the draw itself?

Draw the number in the open. A number wheel over the ticket range, spun once on camera or in a live session, is a draw a remote entrant can actually watch; the winning number is looked up against the stub list, which never has to leave your spreadsheet.

For several prizes, elimination mode retires each winning number as it is drawn, so second prize is drawn from every ticket that has not already won — which is what a prize table means. The draw log keeps the order the numbers came up, which is your results list, already written.

A raffle ticket range from one to two hundred and forty as a number line, with the list closed at a published time and one drawn ticket highlighted
Publish the range, close the list, draw the number in the open — the stub list never has to leave your spreadsheet.

What record should a fundraiser keep?

Enough that a stranger could reconstruct the evening: the published range, the closing time, the recording or the live-session link, and each draw’s id with the number it produced. That is one screenshot of the log and one line in the announcement, not an accounting exercise.

Publish the results where the entries were taken — the group, the page, the newsletter — with numbers rather than only names, so every entrant checks their own ticket instead of asking. A raffle whose results must be asked about is a raffle that gets asked about all year.

How do remote entrants watch the draw?

Run it as a live session and post the link where the tickets were sold. Everyone who opens it watches the same wheel land at the same moment — the draw runs on a server rather than on your machine, so a delayed stream or an edited screen recording stops being an available argument.

The room outlives the moment, too: the results board shows what was drawn to anyone who arrives late, and closing the session freezes it. Hosting needs a free account; ticket-holders need nothing but the link.

Run an online raffle in five steps

  1. Check what your jurisdiction calls a raffle with paid tickets, and whether yours needs a licence — before anything is sold.
  2. Number the tickets and keep one list: number, name, entry. The number is the entry.
  3. Close entries at a published time and announce the final range.
  4. Draw the number in the open — recorded, or as a live session remote entrants can watch — with elimination on for multiple prizes.
  5. Publish the winning numbers with their draw ids, in the same place the tickets were sold.

Keep reading, or start drawing

How to pick a giveaway winner covers the method behind any draw, and the giveaway rules guide turns the redraw and unsold-ticket decisions into published terms.

The raffle winner picker draws from names; for numbered tickets, the number wheel draws the range directly.

Questions about online raffles

A free draw usually is; a paid-ticket raffle is regulated almost everywhere, and the rules differ by country and often by region. The one-sentence test: if entry costs money and the winner is chosen by chance, assume it needs a licence or a recognised exemption until your local guidance says otherwise. This site draws the number; it cannot make the raffle lawful.

Where your raffle is lawful, the platforms themselves mostly allow announcing it, but payment happens off-platform and each network has its own promotion rules worth a read. Keep the ticket list in one place regardless of where the money arrives — the draw is only as checkable as the list behind it.

Decide before the draw and write it into the rules: either the range on the wheel is exactly the sold tickets, so it cannot happen, or an unsold number is announced and redrawn in the open. Both are fair; only the version decided in advance looks it.

Elimination mode. Each winning number leaves the wheel as it is drawn, so the next prize is drawn from every remaining ticket, and the log keeps the order — first prize first. One session, one wheel, and the results list writes itself.