Engagement is one of my specialties. Generating new ideas to keep things interesting is one of my favorite parts of community work. And while fresh ideas are always crucial, there are a few tried-and-true strategies to keep in your back pocket. One of the best is a giveaway. Yes, they may require a little more legwork on the front end -- having to make sure your legal is in order, potential shipping headaches, and ensuring fairness -- but in my experience, the positives almost always outweigh the negatives.
Running a successful community giveaway isn't just about picking random winners – it's a strategic tool that can dramatically grow your community and boost engagement at the same time. In this comprehensive guide, I'll cover everything you need to know to run giveaways that deliver impactful results.
Admittedly, it can sometimes be hard to attribute a direct ROI to something like a giveaway, but the indirect benefits are clear. For example, Wishpond found that contest-related CTAs had a conversion rate that was 3.73% higher than other CTAs. That might not sound like much, but as you get more practice running contests, it can add up fast. If you have a message you want to get in front of people, a giveaway may be a great way to do that.
Before we dive into how you can achieve these results for your community, let me impart what I think is the best advice when planning your giveaway: keep it simple. You don't want the barrier to entry to be too high, otherwise, people won't bother entering. This can be a challenge in the video game space where we love to integrate the game itself into the giveaway as much as possible, but be aware that even asking players to submit a screenshot could affect your engagement rate. That's not to say that you shouldn't try it, just keep in mind that, the easier you make it to participate in the contest, the more people will decide to give it a shot. Ok, let's move on to some more tips.
Planning Your Community Giveaway: Set Clear Goals
Before launching your giveaway, establish specific, measurable objectives. Are you aiming to:
Increase community membership by a certain percentage?
Boost engagement rates across specific platforms?
Collect user-generated content?
Collect valuable community data?
Set concrete targets – for example, "increase daily active users by 25%" or "generate 100 pieces of user-generated content" rather than vague goals like "grow the community." You might not achieve that goal, and that's ok, but you'll have a better idea of what's possible and what tweaks you can make to improve next time.
Choose the Right Prize
Your prize can make or break your giveaway. The best prizes are:
Valuable enough to motivate participation
Relevant to your community's interests
Affordable within your budget
Aligned with your brand or community values
Consider offering multiple prize tiers to increase participation. For example:
Grand Prize: High-value item or experience
Second Place: Medium-value prizes
Runner-ups: Smaller prizes or community perks
As you're choosing your prizing, remember to consider shipping and any restrictions you may need to let your community know about. If you're a US-based game studio, you may not want to ship a big prize pack internationally because not only can international shipping costs be quite expensive, but there are also customs to consider which can make it very difficult and expensive for your winner to claim their prize. The last thing you want is to dash a winner's excitement by complicating things or making it impossible for them to claim their prize. A good workaround for international prizing is to offer a separate, but monetarily equal prize such as a gift card.
Timing Your Giveaway
Strategic timing maximizes participation, so it's important to consider when you'll be announcing the giveaway and make sure you do so at the most optimal time. A few other things to consider as you're planning the timing of your giveaway are:
Keep the length of your giveaway to 1-2 weeks as longer contests often lose momentum
Launch during peak engagement hours to make sure
Avoid major holidays unless they're relevant to your promotion
Consider seasonal relevance for your prizes
Giveaway Mechanics
As you're planning your giveaway mechanics, remember to balance accessibility with value. Consider having multiple "levels" of entry to encourage engagement or allowing bonus entries using a tool like Gleam.io. I love Gleam and have used it to great effect, so while this isn't a partnered post, I'll go into more detail on it below.
Basic entry methods may include:
Following/joining your community
Liking or saving the announcement
Commenting on the post
Sharing the announcement post for the giveaway
While bonus entry methods may include:
Sharing with friends or tagging them in the post
Creating content/UGC
Answering community questions
Completing platform-specific actions
Platform Selection
It's usually not a bad idea to promote your giveaway on most of, if not all of your social channels, although that's not required. Let's say you want to focus on growing your following on Instagram. In that case, there could be an argument to be made for keeping promotions to that channel.
As you're choosing how you'll promote your giveaway, remember to think about the contest mechanics and how they may be enhanced or hindered by a given platform. For example, contests requiring entrants to submit UGC may be better relegated to image-based networks like Instagram, where you could allow them to post their UGC and tag your account to enter. These actions are common and well-known to all Instagram users, so this could be a good way to lower the barrier to entry while also having access to UGC.
Here's a quick breakdown of the channels you may want to use to promote your giveaway and why:
Instagram: Ideal for visual content and easy sharing
Discord: Easily set up a channel for giveaway entries, making sure things are simple for both entrants and community staff alike
Facebook: Perfect for local and interest-based groups
Twitter/X: Excellent for quick, viral spread
Community forums: Best for established communities
One last note: make sure you're clear on the platform-specific rules for each social channel that you plan to use for your contest. The last thing you want to do is break the rules. The consequences of doing so could range from being unable to run your giveaway on that platform to even having your account suspended or banned.
Legal Considerations
To protect your community AND your business, it's important to understand the legal bases you'll need to cover in advance of the launch of your giveaway, including terms of service (ToS) and restrictions. A tool like Gleam.io does include some boilerplate legal that should work for most contests, but if you work for a company that has an in-house legal team, it's worth reaching out to them to make sure everything is buttoned up. While Gleam does have a free plan, the paid version allows you to insert your own legal, so keep that in mind.
I once had a dev team, knowing our community team was planning a giveaway, take it upon themselves to promote a similar, but not identical giveaway on Steam. I'm sure they thought they were doing something good, but since the giveaways differed in how they were described, the entry method, and the prizes being offered, each would have required its own legal, which they didn't have. Luckily, our team caught this right away and was able to help avoid putting the company at legal risk.
Protect your community and your company, and comply with regulations by:
Including clear terms and conditions and restrictions
Stating entry requirements and deadlines
Specifying eligibility (age, location, etc.)
Including required disclaimers
Following platform-specific contest rules
Including any necessary releases for the use of UGC
Promotion Strategy
Simply put, a promotion strategy is your plan for promoting your giveaway. It doesn't have to be complicated. All you need to do is answer the "who", "what", "why", "when", and "how" of promoting your giveaway, and address any cross-promotion possibilities from other sources.
Create a multi-channel promotion plan:
1. The Basics:
Who: Our community on [PLATFORM(s)]
What: US-only giveaway
Why: To grow our audience on [PLATFORM(s)] by X%, boost engagement on [PLATFORM(s)] by X%, and collect [NUMBER] pieces of UGC.
When: [CONTEST BEGINNING DATE] - [CONTEST END DATE]
How: Run giveaway using [TOOL/METHOD], promote on [PLATFORM(s)], Cross-promote using [METHODS]
2. Cross-Promotion:
Email newsletters
Social media channels
Community spaces
- Partner networks
Your promotion strategy doesn't have to be complicated. In fact, keeping it simple is better. Don't be afraid to test various factors by running platform-exclusive giveaways. See what works and what doesn't.
Content Creation
Make sure to give plenty of thought to the assets (images, videos, or other promotional materials) you'll need to get the word out about your giveaway. These assets will depend on how your giveaway works. Video works great for announcing giveaways while static images can be great for reminder posts.
Make sure that the assets you create follow the best practices of each of the platforms you'll be using to promote so that your posts are professional and effective. You don't want to throw a landscape static image on TikTok, a vertical video platform. It's not a good look and wouldn't be very effective.
Here are a few examples of assets you may need to get the most out of your giveaway:
High-quality images of prizes
Clear, branded graphics
Video announcements
Story highlights
Landing page with all details
A "Welcome Mat" on your website that allows visitors to enter
Regarding dimensions, most of your bases will be covered by creating three different sizes:
1920x1080px (landscape - Facebook, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, etc.)
1080x1080px (square - Instagram)
1080x1920px (vertical - Instagram Stories)
Engagement Tactics
Keeping the momentum going throughout the giveaway requires an engagement strategy. Again, it doesn't have to be complicated. It's just a plan outlining how to keep your community engaged while the contest is active. Here are some ways to do that:
Periodic reminder posts - Remind your community that the giveaway is happening. It's easy for us to sometimes forget that every time we say something, someone is hearing it for the first time, so make sure you're continuing to remind your community about the giveaway wherever you're promoting it.
Progress updates - This is a great tactic if your community happens to be participating together towards a common goal, such as in Destiny 2's 2022 Season of the Plunder community event, which wasn't a "giveaway" per se, but you get the point.
Participant spotlights - Participant spotlights are great for all kinds of reasons, but one is for calling attention to your giveaway by featuring community members who are supporting it.
Community team interaction - Engagement between your community and your community team is crucial for many reasons other than giveaways, but giveaways offer a great chance to continue building on your existing engagement strategy.
Countdown posts - Counting down to the end of a giveaway is great for reminding members that the giveaway is ending soon and building a little last-minute hype.
Answer questions promptly - Educate your community as much as possible. If you do, they'll soon start educating each other and that's huge. Spreading clarity on the giveaway and how it works is always good.
Share participation examples - Did your giveaway involve participants submitting content such as a screenshot? If so, share a few with the rest of the community. Not only is it great for engagement, but it also helps to educate others as to how the contest works and maybe inspire them to participate themselves.
Celebrate milestones - Give updates at certain milestones to cheer on the community and build excitement.
Address concerns quickly - This will go a long way towards building trust with your community (which is important above and beyond the giveaway itself). It will also help to educate your community allowing them to share the info amongst themselves.
Foster discussions - Again, a generally good tactic for community engagement.
Managing the Giveaway
Managing the giveaway is important. The last thing you want is for your process to come back and bite you -- especially if the results are visible to your community. Not good. Staying organized and following a careful process is crucial. Remember, we're using this tactic to build a community, not to upset one.
Depending on your capabilities, here are a few ways you can track your entries:
Spreadsheet tracking
Entry verification system
Participation monitoring
Anti-fraud measures
As I mentioned above, there are also tools and software, such as Gleam.io, that you can use to automate the management of the contest and the choosing of the winner(s). Gleam does have a free version that is less robust, but still has some cool capabilities baked in. The great thing about Gleam is that allows you to create "tasks" for your community to complete, such as sharing a social post, visiting a website or YouTube channel, or in the case of paid accounts (which range in price from $10-$49 per month, billed monthly), subscribing to a podcast or visiting a Steam page. The more tasks they complete, the more entries they get. It's a great tool that encourages engagement and spurs growth across multiple channels. I'll do a more thorough walkthrough of Gleam soon, but basically, you set up your giveaway and let Gleam do the rest.
In addition to a tool like Gleam, you could also incorporate things such as random picker tools like Raffyls, which lets you import a list of entrants and randomly selects one for you. This could be a good option if your team is lean and you need big results with little investment.
Winner Selection and Announcement
So, it's time to pick and announce your winner(s). Do so using whichever method you've chosen. Once you have your winner, verify that they followed the entry rules and met the requirements to win. Also, make sure that their contact information is valid.
At this point, you could do one of two things: you could announce the winner via your chosen channels (any channel that the giveaway was promoted on should get a winner announcement post) and ask the winner to reach out to you to coordinate prize delivery, or, you could reach out to the winner directly before announcing them. Have a contingency plan in place in case the winner doesn't respond.
Prepare to be transparent with your community about how the winner was chosen, should the need arise. It's unlikely that there will be trouble here or that anyone will complain, but it's good to have a plan for walking people through the process if needed.
For the announcement itself, create as much excitement around the announcement as possible using tactics as complex as a live winner announcement event, or as simple as announcement posts on the channels that the giveaway was promoted on.
Post-Giveaway Strategy
You did it! You planned and executed a successful giveaway that met -- no -- SHATTERED all of your goals, right? Let's find out. Now comes the part where you review your data to see how things went. Some great KPIs to measure the results of community giveaways are:
Total number of entries
Growth metrics
Engagement rates
Cost per acquisition
ROI calculation
Community feedback
Once you've gathered your data, create an easy-to-understand report that goes over the giveaway, what the goals were, how it was executed, and what the results were. Share this with your team along with your insights. If things went great, explain what you attribute the success to. If things didn't go as planned, try to discern why and suggest changes you could make to future giveaways.
Community Retention
If things went well, you've probably added some new community members. Make sure to have a plan to integrate them into the community and then let your engagement strategy do the rest. Some good ways to integrate new members include:
Welcome sequences
Follow-up content
Community events
Exclusive offers
Best Practices and Tips
Do:
Be transparent about the process
Communicate clearly and frequently
Document everything
Plan for technical issues -- have a "Plan B"
Make it fun and engaging
Don't:
Don't change the rules mid-contest
Don't ignore platform guidelines
Don't forget to verify winners
Don't delay prize delivery
Don't neglect new members
Conclusion and Next Steps
Running a successful community giveaway requires careful planning, clear communication, and active management. Use this guide as your roadmap, and remember to:
1. Set clear, measurable goals
2. Choose relevant, valuable prizes
3. Plan comprehensive promotion
4. Manage actively
5. Follow up effectively
Remember: The best giveaways don't just create temporary excitement – they build lasting community engagement and relationships.
Need help planning an impactful community giveaway? I can help! Reach out to me via the Contact page or LinkedIn, and let's talk about how we can partner to supercharge your community growth through proven engagement tactics like this one.
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