How will the winner be chosen for the Spring Blanket Draw?

With the total raised in the Spring Flower Blanket draw likely to be very close to £9000 it is important that the way the winner is chosen is fair and transparent

I have made the draw method as fair as I possible can. The method I’ve used ensures that each £2 donation ticket has an equal chance of winning. It doesn’t matter if you donated for just 1 ticket or 50, whether you were the first or the last donation or whether you live round the corner or in New Zealand, Hong Kong or the USA. The draw is an even playing field for all.

Spreadsheets!!!!

I was able to download a spreadsheet giving the basic details of each donation from the admin panel of the Just Giving page. I assembled a list of donations from each 24 hour period and checked each one manually to make sure that the donation amounts were correct (I had to convert the ones made in other currencies: US, AUS and Hong Kong dollars, Euros and South African Rands). This generated a list of all the donations made over the 4 weeks of the draw, giving the email of the donor, the amount donated and their message.

I then created a spreadsheet to show the number of tickets that each person bought:

• If you donated £2 (or the equivalent from another currency), you have one line in this sheet, for one ticket.
• If you donated £4 you have two lines for two tickets.
• If you donated £10 you have five tickets.
• And so on.

This master ticket list, which will show the total number of individual tickets, will be finalised on Friday 24 April 2015. It will take me a good part of the day, which is why the draw itself is not until the Saturday.

Giving each ticket a ticket number

Rather than just listing out the donations per ticket and giving each one a number in order from 1,2,3 onwards, I’m going to use an online random number generator to create a random list of numbers between 1 and the number of the final ticket. I sought the help of my son in this and we chose Random.org as this seems to be the most respected one available online. This will produce a random number for each ticket so that each one has an equal chance of winning.

After saving the list in number order to make it easy to locate the winning ticket on Saturday, I will save the list as a pdf and email it to both Lucy at Attic24 and Heather at The Patchwork Heart on Friday. They will act as independent observers of the draw (neither have an entry ticket).

Drawing the winning ticket

• On Saturday, at around 1.30pm UK time, I will use a random number picker also found by my son – Maths Goodies to pick the winning ticket. I will enter the range between 1 and the final ticket number and the online programme will pick the winning number. This pick will be filmed on my phone and loaded up to Facebook and Instagram for about 2pm.
• I will then confirm the name associated with the winning ticket number with Lucy (Attic24) and Heather (The Patchwork Heart) by email. I will then announce the name of the winner on Facebook and Instagram as soon as possible after 2pm. Probably around 2.30pm.
• I will then email the winner. It will be completely up to the winner what they want to do with the blanket and whether to have any publicity, other than being named for the purposes of the draw. I’ll be posting out the blanket early next week 🙂