NEW: We have developed an even better raffle for you. Visit Smarter Tombola to make your employees happy.

Who doesn’t love to win anything?! At many celebrations, companies hold a tombola to make their employees happy. So on Monday, we received a request from a customer to implement a virtual tombola as part of their Christmas party. And thanks to our agile mindset, we can present a solution two days later! You can find out what our app for SharePoint and Teams in Office365 can do, and how you can also hold a raffle in your company in this post.

Raffle

Why would you hold a virtual raffle?

At the moment it is rather difficult and less advisable to hold a proper tombola with an assembled team. But we don’t have to give up on this fun! True to the motto #StayAtHomebola by the German music label Grand Hotel van Cleef, we see that the virtual variant is in no way inferior to the real one.

Also, a virtual raffle means much less effort for the operators 😉

Use of the app and the drawing process

Raffle: Buying tickets

The drawing process of the raffle is as follows:

  1. First, the participant can buy any number of tickets via our app and thus participate in the raffle.
  2. For each ticket purchased, a number is generated and entered in a SharePoint list. The user only sees his tickets, of course.
  3. The participant will then receive an e-mail with the numbers of his purchased tickets.

Finally, there are three options regarding the raffle:

  • “Old-school” by printing the ticket numbers and manually drawing the winning tickets at the celebrations by a lucky angel (of course, this also works perfectly virtually via Teams).
  • Fully automatic via Power Automate. We also use this for determining the winners in our Advent Calendar app. Participants will then be automatically notified by e-mail.
  • Or we’re already thinking hard about developing a Microsoft Teams Meeting app that takes over this draw live during a meeting
Raffle: Overview of purchased tickets

And of course, it is absolutely no problem to integrate the raffle app into Teams:

Raffle: Teams integration

If you are interested in our app, just write us a short email or leave us a few lines in our contact form. We will be happy to send you the package, as well as an installation guide, free of charge!

I want the raffle app!

We would also be happy to get new ideas. For example, our customer implements the tombola in a way that the employee buys one or more tickets for an amount X and the company then doubles and donates this amount. We at Smarter Business Solutions will do this in such a way that every employee can purchase tickets for additional “activities”, e.g. a cool blog post like this one is worth five lots. Cleaning the coffee machine is worth one ticket. This means that we create a catalog of activities and the employee can then select tickets via our raffle app and thereby purchase them. If you have any more ideas – write to us!