With Love, From Us… To You 🎶 — Win a Cruise for Two & More!

Hey Everyone! It’s been a little quiet around here lately, but we’ve been hard at work at some new stuff we think is going to rock your world & change the way you run giveaways forever. Starting today, we’re delighted to give you a teensy weensy sneak peek of what’s to come.

But more importantly…

Introducing the #SpreadSomeJoy Sweepstakes

What’s the benefit of running a giveaway? As admins, we know there’s no single answer to that question. Giveaways serve many purposes, and are well-suited for a wide range of goals. Whether you’re causing a buzz for your new product, generating sales leads, growing your audience, collecting feedback, … whatever you’re doing: giveaways are a powerful tool.

And as an admin, there’s so much to consider logistically — from prize selection – to scheduling and logistics – to launch checklists, launch-day, post-launch promotion, moderation, audience interaction, and on and on — it’s easy to overlook the best part of giveaways: Making people happy.

Contacting your winner(s) is a simple email on your end, but don’t forget: you just made someone’s day! And you’ll make it again when their prize arrives in the mailbox. Giveaways are uniquely powerful at bringing joy into your audience’s daily life. Winning is a rush!

Now it’s your turn!

You give and give and give. Well, now it’s time to receive. Today we’re thrilled to launch the biggest giveaway we’ve ever put together — just to say We 💛 You! Always have, always will. And we want to take a moment to stop and spread some joy into your life. You deserve it ☺️

So without further ado, I’m stoked to introduce the Rafflecopter #SpreadSomeJoy sweepstakes!

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Many will enter. Many will win…

(OK, that was cheesy 😝 – but the prizes sure aren’t!)

The Prizes

We’ve got a host of cool prizes in store, which we’ve broken up into 3 categories:

  • One (huge-mongous) Grand Prize – One very lucky someone will win an epic cruise vacation for themselves and a partner.
  • Two Winner’s Choice Prizes – Two others will get to choose between a pair of red-hot items that are topping everyone’s wishlist this year.
  • 10 Weekly Prizes – 10 lovely people will have their day made with a prize we think will bring you a little joy nearly every single day.

How to Enter

Entering the drawings couldn’t be easier. There’s no complicated forms, no annoying manual verification, no hassle. You’ll get entered automatically just by tweeting, commenting, posting, and a few other things. Read on…

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The Grand Prize: A Cruise for Two

First up, let’s talk about the grand prize – the real goods – the main shebang – the big cheese – the hot diggity – the… OK we’ll stop 🙄


Picture is for demonstration purposes. Cruise will not necessarily take place on the ship pictured.

Awwww yeah, that’s right – get your cruise on! Summer may soon be coming to an end, but your dreams of a glorious, pampered vacation don’t have to. In fact – now’s the time to start dreaming about next year! Let’s make it a doozie, shall we? 😎

One Grand Prize Winner will receive 2 Carnival Gift cards for $1,000 each, good toward almost any Carnival cruise & any number of on-board luxuries.

You can enter from now through Sunday, November 5th @ 11:59pm MDT

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Winner’s Choice Prizes

In addition to the grand prize, there will also be two “Winner’s Choice” prize drawings, each featuring a pair of the year’s hottest must-have items. They’ll make fantastic gifts. Or, you know… not 😉

If you win, you get to choose which one you want. What’s more: every time you enter to win a Winner’s Choice prize, you also get an entry into the drawing for the cruise! It’s a win-win(-win-win-win) situation!

Apple Watch Series 2 –OR–  GoPro HERO5

The theme for the first Winner’s Choice is outdoor recreation…


Photo is for demonstration purposes. Apple Watch configuration may be different than what’s pictured.

Into tracking what you eat, where you go, and how much you do? The Apple Watch is for you! The Series 2 features built-in GPS, water resistance, and apps for almost everything. It’s the ultimate device for a healthy lifestyle — and it’s also just dang cool! 🤓

Or maybe sharing your adventures sounds more fun than analyzing them. In that case, grab the GoPro! It’s got all the features you’ve come to know like stunning video, and tons of mounts & accessories. But the Hero5 is also waterproof, has a built-in LCD screen, and more. It’s epic! 😎

You can enter to win from Tuesday, August 15 through Sunday, September 25 @ 11:59pm MDT

Nintendo Switch  –OR–  PlayStation 4 Pro

But hey, we’re equal-opportunity recreators! So the second Winner’s Choice is about kicking it indoors…


Photo is for demonstration purposes. Nintendo Switch configuration may be different than what’s pictured.

Dare I say the Nintendo Switch is the freshest, most innovative gaming system in recent memory. It’s thoughtfully designed, and already has a handful of stand-out games. (Don’t ask how much of my life I’ve lost to Zelda:BoTW) Play it on your TV, on the way out the door, in the car, on the bus… at work… on the toilet… 😳

But maybe you prefer the traditional consoles. In that case, help yourself to the PS4 Pro! We all know the PS4 rocks, and the Pro version features an even beefier processor and graphics unit, as well as 4K output, and more. (Heck, IMHO you’re justified in picking it for Rocket League alone) ⚽️🚗💨

Enter starting Monday, September 25 @ 6am MDT through Sunday, November 6 @ 11:59pm MDT.

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Awesome Weekly Prizes

As if the grand prize and awesome monthly prizes weren’t enough, every week we’ll be giving away something we think will make your day-to-day life a little better, easier, or more fun.

And to top it off… Every time you enter to win a weekly prize, you also get an entry into the drawing for the monthly prize AND the cruise. Huzzah!

So what have we picked? Well, you’ll just have to find out 😁


Willy Wonka will not be one of the prizes. Trust us… it’s for the best.

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How to Enter

Entering to win is easier than giving candy to a toddler. You’ll get entries automatically simply for tweeting, commenting, subscribing to our newsletter, and a few other things. There are no entry forms to fill out. No verification to copy/paste. No hassle. Just do what you’d normally do: tweet, comment, and post.

Leave a Comment: Where would you cruise?

In fact, you can get an entry just for leaving a comment on this blog post. Just scroll down a little ways, and let us know where you’ll go if you win the grand prize. Et voilà you’ve got your first entry.

(Be sure you’re logged in, so we have an email to contact you with if you get picked!)

But wait! There’s (way, way, way) more!

You can double, triple, quadruple, quintuple, sextuple, …whatever math word means 7×… your chances to win – and then some! To find out more, visit the giveaway homepage by clicking the big blue button below:

 

Get More Entries

 

 

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Don’t miss out! Follow along…

Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram for:

Prize Announcements

Be the first to hear about each new weekly prize, and find out right away when the next Winner’s Choice prize goes up for grabs.

Bonus Entries

We’ll be posting bonus entries most days on Facebook & Twitter, and occasionally sending out exclusive entries to our newsletter subscribers! Keep an eye out for the 🚁✨ symbol — If you see it, a bonus entry awaits…

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Rafflecopter.Next

I mentioned at the beginning that we’ve been hard at work on some new awesomeness for you. If you’re interested in knowing more about that, take 60 seconds to fill out a form, and we’ll be in touch!

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For legal reasons, this giveaway is open only to US residents aged 21 years old or older. And — as always — is subject to its Terms & Conditions. Take a gander if you get a kick out of that sort of thing 🤓

Adding a List of FAQ’s to SnapEngage

We love SnapEngage, and so do our users. It gives them a warm, fuzzy feeling to be able to get their question answered right away, and it gives us the opportunity to put a personal touch on our support. Wouldn’t trade it.

However, chatting with folks can take up a lot of time, and we tend to get the same few questions over and over. The top 10 questions probably take 90% of our support time. We put these in an FAQ page, but people will still click that big green “Live Support” button without checking the FAQ page (I know I would), and we’ll still have to spend support time pointing them to the right question.

I wanted to put the top FAQ questions right alongside the support widget, so folks would pay attention and hopefully save us some support time. Unfortunately there’s no “standard” way to do this with SnapEngage (without paying them do build it custom), so I decided to take a couple of hours and hack something together myself. It turned out pretty nicely, and here’s how you can replicate it. You can and should tweak this to suit you:

First, you’ll need a list of links to your FAQ questions. I used a list like this:
Then we’ll use jQueryto bind to the click event of the SnapEngage button and slice and dice the widget to inject our list:
There are a few important things going on to note:

  • We’re using live() to bind to the click event since the SnapEngage button gets created dynamically (although it should be created by the time $(document).ready() is called anyway)
  • We’re using setTimeout() so the code doesn’t execute immediately. This gives us a slight delay between the time the chat widget is rendered and the time we show the FAQ’s. It’s a nice little trick to draw attention to them without being obnoxious.
  • We animate (“slide out”) the list for the same reason: it’s a subtle way to draw attention.
  • We’re using jQuery Easing for nice, smooth animations.

Next comes the Styling. You can and should style to fit your site, but here’s the core CSS you should include needed to make everything work properly:

The rest of the CSS (that makes it all fancy-like) is too long to embed here, but it’s on GitHub. Feel free to totally steal it.

Heres’ the result on our dashboard page:

Sweet! I’d love to hear any thoughts you have on the approach or how it could be better.

— J.R. (@runningskull)

 

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Sharing is Good!

Late evening on a Friday? Perfect time to announce a new Rafflecopter feature!

We all learned in Kindergarten that sharing is good, and now it’s easy to share your Rafflecopter widget with other people.

Before  now, you had to copy the code and paste it in an email, which had its problems. Many email programs do strange and wacky things to the widget code (that usually make it not work), and sometimes what you paste isn’t what the person on the other end sees.

So now we’ve made it dead-simple to share the other widget with anyone you want. On the widget Preview page, you’ll see a brand new box, titled (appropriately :D) “Share the Code”

Just share this link!

Just copy that link and share it with whoever you want. Here’s what they’ll see:

This is what they’ll see

That’s a copy/paste-friendly page where they can copy the widget code and learn how to use it.

Your kindergarten teachers were right. Sharing is good! :D

— J.R. (@runningskull)

The Grid! (Keeps Cheaters from Prospering)

It’s a rainy afternoon here in Boulder, but we’d like to announce an awesome new Rafflecopter upgrade anyway!  :D

Verifying that your winners’ entries are all valid is one of the most important parts of the giveaway process. No one wants cheaters to prosper. And yet it’s one of the weakest links in the Rafflecopter chain. Besides the “Export to Excel” button, the Moderate Page doesn’t do much to help with the verification process.

We’re working on some things that will hopefully make bogus entries a thing of the past, but for now we’ve made it much, much easier to tell if an entry is valid or not.

…introducing The Grid :)

It may seem like a lot to take in, but it’s easy to get the hang of, and it makes verifying your winners a lot easier!

The Grid in action

Knock ’em Out with a 1-2 Punch

You can analyze your entries however you want, but here’s how we do it. There are 2 main steps to catching a cheater. Let’s say that Mr. Greg Goodson won our giveaway, and we want to find out if he cheated.

Step 1: Search for the Winner – You can search for their name, email, IP address, or any other column. This will filter out any entries that don’t match your search term, leaving only the person in question.

Click for larger

 

Step 2 – Group the Entries – this breaks down the person’s entries in a way that’s easy to figure out at-a-glance.

The Grid in action

Look at that. Those were supposed to be 1-time entries and he entered way more than he should have. Busted!

There’s a lot more you can do by combining your abilities to search, sort, and group the entries. For instance…

  • You can group the winner’s entries by entry option, then use sort to quickly scan and make sure the winner only tweeted once per day
  • You can search the winner’s IP address to see if the entered under multiple names from the same computer.

There’s a lot more you can do with the grid. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Along with The Grid, we also added the ability for you to add entries manually, which should come in handy!

… in case you missed it, don’t forget that you can now add multiple winners to your giveaways!

UPDATE (BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND)

Your wish is our command. We’ve added back the option to delete entries from The Grid!

Get those entries out of here!

 

— J.R. (@runningskull)

 

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We Have The Technology: Switching Our Hosting Provider

This is an old post related to a change we made during the weekend of June 17-19, 2011. All of these issues were resolved by Monday, June 20. Thanks!

Hey folks! First off, thanks so much for being part of Rafflecopter these past several weeks. We’re thrilled about the response we’ve gotten to and we’re working night and day to make it even better. Thanks to you, we’ve been growing and growing steadily since we launched just a few weeks ago. And we want to be able to keep growing, and to keep working with more and more bloggers and having more and more fun :P

In order to do that, we’re making frequent upgrades to our behind-the-scenes infrastructure to make it faster and more reliable for everyone. Over the past 24 hours, we made a big leap and switched our hosting provider to a service that will be able to easily keep pace with us as we grow, and provide us with the flexibility to add a bunch of the awesome features we have coming down the line.

Unfortunately, the change seems to be causing a few issues today. If you’ve had problems entering a giveaway today (the vast majority of people have been just fine), this next part will explain what’s going on and when/how it will get better.

The issue revolves around what’s known as DNS Propagation. The full technical explanation of DNS is crazy-boring, but you can think of DNS as the phonebook of the internet. Your browser looks up a name in the DNS phonebook (in this case “rafflecopter.com”), and DNS phonebook gives you back a “phone number” (really an IP Address), where you can reach that name. When we changed hosts late Friday, we changed our IP Address (our “phone number”) as well, and now the phone books need to be updated. But………

When a new phonebook comes out, I may already have the new one while yours has yet to be delivered. So if we look up the same name in different phone books, we might get two different phone numbers, one of which won’t work anymore.

That seems to be what’s causing the issues we’ve been hearing about today. The phone books have been updated, but they’re still in the process of being delivered to everyone, and a small percentage of people still have the old copy. Most of the time, a DNS change only takes a few hours to take effect, but sometimes (and for some people, depending on your location) it can take 24-48 hours for the update to fully take effect.

Mostly, that means that we just have to wait for it to work out. Everything should be sorted out by Monday at the latest. In the meantime, there are a couple of things you can try to speed things along. These may or may not work, but if you don’t want to wait (and we don’t blame you) they’re worth a shot:

  • Clear your browser cache – You could have an old version of some Rafflecopter files that need to be updated since we made the change.
  • Flush your computer’s DNS cache – This is the “old copy” of the phonebook, and if you throw it away, you might start using the new edition (unless it hasn’t been delivered yet, in which case you’ll keep using the old one)

We’re very sorry that anyone at all is having issues, and I wish there was more we  could do to fix the problem immediately. The silver lining is that these are but temporary issues on the way to a much more stable and speedy Rafflecopter for everyone!

Thanks so much for your understanding. If you have any questions, you can leave a comment or contact us outside of the blog. We’ll be happy to answer and help as much as we can.

Until next time,

— J.R. (@runningskull)