You may have noticed that as of today, all of our giveaways are now utilizing Rafflecopter. What do you think? I’m personally very excited about the switch as it not only makes it much faster for my readers to enter giveaways, but much faster for me to post them. And time saved = more giveaways so that’s always a good thing!
The reason I have waited to make the switch is that I wanted to give it time and see how widely Rafflecopter would be adopted and also how they dealt with their initial technical kinks. I know that many of my readers are using older computers and I was concerned about compatibility issues; I’m also reluctant to use third-party services when I don’t need to as I don’t have direct control over certain aspects of the functionality – for example, if Rafflecopter has downtime, there’s nothing I can do about it. However, I think Rafflecopter has responded to its extensive popularity with bigger servers as they have not appeared to have an outage for some time. Also, at this point Rafflecopter has been adopted to the point of almost being the new standard – I infrequently see blog giveaways utilizing comment entry methods now and I don’t want to turn off my readers by having a system that is more time-consuming than what most other blogs use. Therefore, we’ve decide to transition over and so far I love it and you guys seem to love it! Of course, if you have any feedback – good OR bad – please feel free to leave a comment below or email me at supercoupongirl@gmail.com.
What do you think of Rafflecopter?
I’ve only used Rafflecopter once. I am currently holding a Giveaway with it on my Rocky Mountain Popcorn Giveaway. So far so good. I really like using Rafflecopter to enter contests too. I definitely am seeing a large majority of bloggers using it.
Rafflecopter is ok, but ONLY if it works, right now it DOES NOT work, so it is USELESS, as it often is
I went to http://www.rafflecopter.com/ it is not working, so what now? That is the problem with rafflecopter, like the site http://www.rafflecopter.com/ IT DOES NOT WORK as if claims
Hi Dan and Kim, thanks so much for taking the time to give me your feedback! I take your opinions and concerns very seriously. I, too, have reservations about the possibility of Rafflecopter downtime which is why it took me so long to adopt it. I checked their Twitter page and it appears that their hosting server is having some issues that is causing it to run slowly today – figures that they would have an outage as soon as I decided to migrate over to them, LOL!
I’m going to keep an eye on it and see if things like this continue to be an issue. At this point I’m starting to lose readers because of *Not* using Rafflecopter, so my goal is to provide a solution to what people are asking for. All of your feedback helps me determine what direction to move in so I’m really grateful for your continued readership and taking time out to tell me what you think and what you need!
The thing that bothers me about Rafflecopter (the only thing) is the question of how does the blog owner know that you made a comment when your comment name (say on WordPress where I comment as ‘AnnaZed’ not like here where I can pick) doesn’t match your name on the Rafflecopter (which is linked to your facebook name). I have even discussed this on email with the Rafflecopter guy who conceded that it was a problem. Why not have a square that says ‘please give the name that you commented under’ in the Rafflecopter? How hard could that be? Currently I always post this:
“The Rafflecopter calls me ‘Margot’ since it is accessing my facebook where I am ‘Margot Core’; the Rafflecopter connects to this email: annazed10 (at) yahoo (dot) com”
But I don’t like putting my real name in the comments.
Margot – I hear ya. The way I’ve dealt with this is that when I have people leave blog comments, I require them to leave their comment number in the “Extra info” box in Rafflecopter. Otherwise it could get difficult to find their comment if you had a giveaway that ended up with hundreds of comments. When someone comments on my site, I can view their email address in my administrator panel (And only I can see it), so I can verify that against their email in Rafflecopter. I’m totally fine with people using nicknames publicly because like you said, not everyone wants their real name out there!
@Beeb I see that solution on some sites, and it seems practical. The only exception I can think of (and this happens to me a lot actually) is if I’m on a blog that utilizes a certain pseudonymous (is that a word?) log-in of mine that is linked to a different email from my facebook email (the one that Rafflecopter utilizes). I sometimes think that my comments just disappear and that I even might be getting eliminated from various giveaways that I enter because I think the blog owner might search the comments as you indicated looking for the same email as the Rafflecopter log-in; if that all makes any sense.
What do you guys think of Giveaway Tools: http://giveawaytools.com/ ?
That totally makes sense, Margot. If you’re on a site that requires a certain login, like a WordPress.com site, and you have to comment with an account that utilizes a different email from your Facebook account, I could see how that could generate confusion. On our comment field, readers can enter whatever email/nickname they like manually, so you won’t have a problem entering your Facebook email, and our Rafflecopter form also asks for you comment number if you do a blog comment for an extra entry, so we’ll be able to easily verify the blog comment entries left in our giveaways.
I’ve seen Giveaway Tools popping up on a few sites and I think it’s interesting. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out to see how this new generation of widgets develops!