How to Run a Virtual Raffle at Work—Fast and Easy

NEW: We’ve built an even better raffle experience. Visit Smarter Tombola to delight your employees.

Who doesn’t love winning something?! At many company celebrations, a raffle is a fun way to reward employees. Earlier this week, a customer asked us to create a virtual raffle for their Christmas party. Thanks to our agile mindset, we delivered a working solution just two days later. In this post, you’ll learn what our app for SharePoint and Microsoft Teams in Microsoft 365 can do and how you can run a raffle in your company with minimal effort.

Why a virtual raffle?

Right now, hosting an in‑person raffle with everyone in the same room isn’t always practical or advisable. But you don’t have to miss out on the fun. Inspired by #StayAtHomebola from the German music label Grand Hotel van Cleef, we’ve seen that a virtual raffle can be every bit as engaging as a physical one.

It also requires far less effort for organizers 😉

How the app works and the draw process

Here’s how the raffle works:

1. Participants use our app to buy any number of tickets and are automatically entered into the draw.
2. For each ticket purchased, a number is generated and written to a SharePoint list. Users can, of course, only see their own tickets.
3. Participants receive an email listing the numbers of their purchased tickets.

There are three ways to conduct the draw:

• Old‑school: print the ticket numbers and draw the winners manually during your celebration—this also works nicely in a virtual Microsoft Teams meeting.
• Fully automated with Power Automate. We use this approach for the draw calculation in our Advent Calendar app. Participants are notified automatically by email.
• Or run it live with a Microsoft Teams meeting app that conducts the draw during the session.

And of course, integrating the virtual raffle into Teams is no problem at all:

Interested in the app?

If you’d like to try our app, send us a short email. We’ll gladly provide the package and installation guide free of charge.

I want the Tombola app!

We also love creative ideas. One customer lets employees buy one or more tickets for amount X, and the company doubles the total revenue and donates it to charity. At Smarter Business Solutions, we plan to let employees earn tickets by completing additional “tasks”—for example, writing a great blog post like this one earns five tickets; cleaning the coffee machine earns one. We’ll provide a catalog of tasks in the app so colleagues can choose and collect tickets. Got more ideas? Tell us!