Running a competition? Here’s a quick and easy way to select a winners or winners at random.
Over at Sydney Anglicans this week I’ve been running a competition. Five people who commented on ‘Don’t mess with conventions‘ were put in the draw to win a copy of Steve Krug’s (not Steve Kryger’s!) book ‘Don’t make me think‘. Here’s how I selected the winners – you can click on any of the screenshots to enlarge them.
1. I collected the names of the people who had commented on the post and put them in a spreadsheet, and assigned each commenter a single entry number. I did this because some people commented on the post more than once and I didn’t want to give multiple commenters a greater chance of winning.
2. I opened up random.org – a website that generates random integers.
3. I set the boundaries – smallest value = 1, largest value = 26, and asked that 5 random integers be generated:
4. I clicked ‘Get Numbers’
5. The website generated 5 random numbers in the range of 1-26:
6. I then matched up these numbers with the corresponding entry numbers in my spreadsheet:
7. The winners are being notified!
Should have commented – They were good odds.
Curses!
People either side of me won!
Are you sure you didn’t use notrandom.org?
weeeee!!!! I win!!!!
ahem. Sorry Ian
Bob also made the following suggestion as an alternative way of choosing a random winner:
“Why not put =rand() in entry number for everyone, then sort by that column? Then just pick the top 5 (or whatever) — you’re in excel anyway.”