How We Judge Our Giveaways

As we have so many competitions running at the moment in our Christmas Giftaway, naturally, we've been asked how we choose the winners. We have a lot of family and friends who read Southern In-Law - as well as many, many readers who email us regularly and who have become our friends. We also have many people who enter competitions who may have never seen the blog before entering the competition. 

In the spirit of a giveaway, we want to make sure that the competition is fair to everyone - and that's why we judge our competitions a little bit differently. 

As each entry comes in, we copy and paste the answers into a database. Before judging that competition - we scramble the entries so they're not in any order and then we sift through them all. 

Competition tip: We look for the most genuine and unique entries. That means if we feel like your answer is faked just to win - or copy and pasted from Google, it's incredibly unlikely we're going to choose it. 

Usually we get down to about 5 best entries and then we look through each of those to decide the best one (we keep those entries in case the original winner doesn't reply too). If we really can't decide, we number them 1 to 5 and then pick a random number using a number generator. 

This is the same for every. single. competition. - unless the entry process is a little more complicated (say a photo competition etc). Every winner of our competitions has been picked by their answer - not their name, their location, their age, whether they're our family member or our friends - it's an equal playing field so that everyone has a chance. 

That said, we are looking to run some competitions/give away some prizes just for dedicated SIL readers as a way to say thank you. We know you are the ones who read/comment/email and we cannot thank you enough. Your genuine interest in the blog means more to us than anything else.

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