My 7 wishes for Rafflecopter

Like many bloggers I use and am a fan of Rafflecopter. Rafflecopter provides a straight forward and widget based system to track competition entries and pick a winner. The widget typically trades social actions such as tweets and follows for points and those points represent chances of winning the competition.

Rafflecopter recently updated their website, improving the interface bloggers used to create competitions. It was a good job. While I like the site upgrade and love the widget that doesn’t mean I don’t wish for more.

My current Rafflecopter usage is at the paid level but I don’t have a “personal” enterprise account at my disposal.

My Rafflecopter wishlist


It’s time to move the “refer a friend” out of the Business price tier and into the Blogger tier. Rafflecopter should concentrate on competition management and analytics for their Business clients and given the lack of new features on the Blogger side the time has now come to make this change.

Rafflecopter is a widget based company but they don’t really make as much of this strength as they could. A new angle for them would be to support treasure hunts. This would mean many widgets, smaller than the usual one, that can be hidden around the blog. Clicking on the treasure piece widget is how users indicate they’ve solved the clue and found the treasure icon.

There is a lot of dead space on the widget once the competition has finished. While Rafflecopter isn’t using that space (no Rafflecopter branding unlocks at the business tier) why not let bloggers use them? The dead space could be a banner to the latest competition, a social call to action or even a blogger managed ad.

Help me wrestle the widget into a blog post. The default widget is quite large and wants to centre itself. I’ve come to accept that now and design my posts so that widget can do just that. Originally my instinct was to right or left align the widget alongside a chunk of text. If I’d fought with CSS then perhaps I could have achieved that. My goal with Rafflecopter is to save time and avoid fights. It would be nice if they provided some helpful styling and alignment features.

Flag suspicious entries. Fake competition accounts are legion and a problem. Even if this is just a Business account feature I think Rafflecopter would make a lot of friends if they helped suggest which competition qualification actions might have been carried out by sock puppet accounts and perhaps not therefore valid winners.

Track users across competitions. Who’s a return user? Who’s completed more than one competition? Once again; this may just be a Business Level feature but one worth adding.

Who’s followed and unfollowed? Even though Twitter’s introduction of Mute means the value of “Follow to win” competitions have dropped I still think it would be useful to see who/what percentage of competition entries jumped ship after the prize was announced. Another Business Level feature.

What do you think? Have I missed any of your Rafflecopter wishes off the list? I’d be happy to hear them in the comment section below.

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