Note: this article relates to our raffle style of prizes. We also have claimable prizes, ones that can be immediately claimed with points. Check out this help article to learn more about claiming a claimable prize.

Many of the prizes in BackerClub giveaways are a "raffle" selection type. This means we randomly select winners, but we do so while also taking into account the number of points each member has entered to win the prize.

It's similar to a typical raffle where participants purchase tickets that then go into a bin and are pulled out at random - the more tickets you have in the bin, the greater your odds are of winning. With BackerClub giveaways, you can think of each reward point committed to a prize as 1 entry.

To select the winners, we use a special algorithm that linearly weights a random selection based on the points for each member's prize entry. This means, just like the typical raffle, a member with 90 points entered (aka "committed") for a prize will have exactly 10x the odds of winning vs. a different member that has only 9 points entered for the same prize. Thus, the more points you commit to a prize, the better your odds are of winning!

Tip: with a little math, you can roughly determine your odds of winning a particular prize. If a prize says that it has 900 points committed by the community, and you enter with 100 points (bringing the total to 1,000 points entered by the community), you have roughly a 10% chance of winning. It doesn't matter if 500 members have entered or 50, you still have a 10% chance of winning overall.