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!