KP’s Super Random Raffle Draw Happy Fun Time: how KP created a better raffle system.

Ever participated in a raffle where all you get is a lowly ticket and wait for someone to stick their hand in a box to draw your number. The suspense is killing me as they call out each number slowly. Once the winner jumps up happy they won the prize, the moment is over. Could this age old raffle system be improved? Here at KP we did just that.

How to build a better raffle system. Normal raffles are quite boring. You get a number and you wait for a chance to get that number drawn. In some cases, you get multiple numbers, thus increasing your chances of winning but it still comes down to that one time drawing. To improve on that process, we introduce a three step process that gets more exciting at each step.

After you gather all the entries, which can consist of names, numbers or any other representation of the persons in attendance, it is entered into a database and KP’s random raffle system generator assigns them into a matrix. In the matrix, entries are randomly assigned a letter and a number and then displayed on the screen with two prompts. When a letter is drawn and keyed into the system, the list shrinks down to either 40, 24, 20, or 12 entries. An appropriate die (D6, D10, D12, D20) is tossed and the number is entered which will give us two names. The two finalists are brought up on to stage and each given a chance to call heads or tails. After whatever antics that may arise as to who calls the coin flip, the winner is determined. That’s it! Simple, fun, and exciting! Takes the normal boring raffle of just drawing a lucky name to something exciting.

But…
It wasn’t that easy, for me that is…

With the power outage and disrupting the afternoon classes, my master class I was teaching ran over time. What was suppose to conclude at 5 rand to 5:45. The teachers really wanted to know more about social media and I had to teach. The contest officially concluded at 4:00 but entries still kept coming in. I had less than 45 minutes to:

1. Collect all Twitter, Facebook, and Wiki impressions.
2. Build an algorithm to extract names automatically.
3. Compile into a database.
4. Test the interface.
5. Setup during the awards reception and execute.

I had already lost half an hour and the awards reception had started without me. Here’s a detailed account of what I did for those who cared to know how I scrambled to build this in less than an hour.

The first step was to capture all impressions. I went online and cached all the twitter posts, saved into a text file. That took little time since I had high speed internet. I then wrote a little script that captured the usernames from each post and transferred it into a comma delimited append file. I had to monitor the script as it ran through the names for posting anomalies and error codes. I repeated the steps for facebook and had to tweak the script to account for the different posting styles and accommodate comments. Lastly, wiki was much easier since I can generate a report of who made edits and just parsed out my entries.

Some of you might ask, “why didn’t you write the code and test it out at home?” Well my answer is simple. I’m too cocky and thought I could whip it up on the spot. I had the process already keyed out in my head and it was just a matter taking what’s in my head and putting it in practice. I was overconfident and had my timetables set (except for the power failure) in my mind.

When I completed my task, rushed down to the reception with laptop in hand and set up with five minutes to spare.

The raffle went amazingly well. Everyone had fun, enjoyed the process. A newcomer to twitter with only a few posts actually made it on the final 20 board. When the list was brought down to the final two, Laura and Cameron were two perfect candidates. Laura had never tweeted before this conference and Cameron had only used it on occasion but when presented with this contest, they became twitter fanatics! They posted their experience throughout the conference, what they were doing, what classes they were taking, and expressed themselves through the digital web. It was an amazing experience to see these two and the 80 other participants use the online medium this way.

New connections were made, friendships formed and a history of their experience is forever captured online. Unfortunately, there had to be a winner. Cameron called heads and Laura agreed. Brooke, my lovely assistant from Talcott flipped the coin and it landed tails. The happy winner gets up and speaks about how she never used Twitter and that weekend she had contacted her students and asked if they would be willing to use this tool to communicate and collaborate. She got an overwhelming response.

That concludes our super raffle session. To see the video in action, see the below video link. It’s rather dark and I should have adjusted the exposure setting before heading up on stage. Oh well. The acceptance speech is amazing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BE1kgdMYUlg