Selecting the winner of a contest is always complicated. Sometimes user votings can give you an idea, but you can use other methods that are automatic and impartial to try and share the responsibility with somebody or something else. There is also the possibility to pay a Notary Public to release you from this burden. This is exactly why we have come up with this new option. Since we believe that selecting a winner for your promo shouldn’t be a nightmare and, also, because you have asked hundreds of times, we have developed a new option in the statistics section which allows the system to select the winner or winners for you.

How do Cool Tabs applications select the winner or winners?

We are going to explain this to you step by step so that you can see how easy it is to select a single or several winners.

1. You need to go to the administration panel of Cool Tabs, and click on the “See contributions” icon of the promotion which has just ended and for which we need to select a winner.

2. In this section, you will find a brand new option called , as you might have guessed, “Winners”. Please click on this option to continue.

3. In the “Contest winners” section, if you have still not selected the winners as it is the case here, you will see the option “Select winners now“.

4. Here you will see the various options available to select the winner or winners of the competition.

3 ways to select the winners

3 different methods are available to select the winner:

1. Manual selection: If you have selected the winner before a notary, or if you are sure of who is going to win, this option will allow you to add the email addresses of the lucky winners and their substitutes (if any) straight away, and then save them into the application.

2. Random draw of participants: This option is used for promotions in which all participants compete under the same conditions, that is, those promotions or contests in which there is no right answer or an answer that is better than the others. Instead, all the users who have participated are directly eligible for the final draw. For the application to pick the winner, you will need to add the number of winners you need and the number of substitute winners (if any). When these fields are filled in, click on “Get in the draw” and…. ta–dah! The names of the lucky winners will be displayed.

3. Random draw among the participants who meet some requirements: 4 filters can be used in this draw:

• Participants who have obtained at least X votes in the contest (in case the contest allows for votings). If the promotion is a Buzz promo, this will mean X points per the overall votes achieved.
• Participants who have invited at least X friends to join the contest (in case this is relevant for the type of competition you have created).
• Participants who have posted the contest on their walls at least X times (in case this is relevant for the type of competition you have created).
• Add users with email address (the conditions above shall also be met): This option is ideal for competitions in which only a given number of people have answered correctly to the question or questions. In this case, you would copy their email addresses and the draw would take place only among them. This can also be used in photography or video competitions. Particularly, when you know for sure who are going to be the finalists (because the video or image they have uploaded was one of the best ones), and you would like the application to randomly pick the winner from the finalists who have been previously picked.

Once you have selected the filter or filters you would like to use in your contest, click on “filter participants” to add the number of winners and substitutes you wish to have, just like you have done in the previous options. When these sections are completed, you will go to “Get in the draw” and, once again, the name of the winner will display.

On the winners and substitutes screen, you will be given the option to save the results of the draw and publish the names of the contest winners.Therefore, you will have two different options to publish the names of the winners:

• If you enable the option ‘publish results’: Everyone accessing the application will be able to see this information. However, this won’t be the case if you have activated the option ‘Enable a different Body/Content to be shown when the promotion ends’ in the promo settings. If this is the case, the application will then be ready to display some other information and won’t publish the results.

• If you enable the option ‘Enable a different Body/Content to be shown when the promotion ends‘: You can use this section to publish the names of the winners. You don’t need to use the default style from the section before, you can give free rein to your imagination. You just need to copy the names of the winners and paste them into this field of the promotion settings, using the same design you’ve used on the other screens of the application. This will allow you to add a little spark of creativity to your list of winners.

And that’s it. Releasing you from the burden of having to select a winner is as simple as that. Once you have published the results of the draw on your application, in case you want to do so, don’t forget to post a new status on your fan page to let people know that you have already selected the winners of your contest, with a link to the application. As usual, we recommend you include the link supported by mobile devices, which we would provide you with.

Below you can see how the list of winners will look like if you use our default option:

Try our applications now: They will select the winner for you >>