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November 28, 2007 / Filed under: Holidays, Services

My family does a "Secret Santa" gift exchange each year, and one thing we always find clumsy is the actual process of drawing names out of a hat (or a bowl). It often consists of someone cutting up little pieces of paper, mixing them up in a bowl, and having each person grab just one.

Trouble is, it's too easy to accidentally grab multiple pieces of paper with one swipe, or have the paper unfold itself in mid-air so others can see which name we pulled. And other times the paper drops on the floor, also revealing which name we pulled.

Other than the clumsiness, our best efforts to mix the paper around just doesn't seem random enough. Combine that with having to get each participant in the same room for the drawing, the entire experience could certainly use some improvement.

A better way would be to have a system or application do it. That way we know it's randomized properly, and we don't need each participant in attendance to run the drawing.

Enter Drawnames.com.

Drawnames.com solves a lot of overhead involved with drawing names. It works in three easy steps:

1. Add members to your group. Simply provide a name and email address for each member.
2. Exclude matches for group members. Let's say you don't want significant others to be paired together for a "Secret Santa" exchange. Easily specify this information.
3. Run the matching program for your group. Just click a button, and it's done!

Each participant is emailed directions on how to find out which person they drew. This involves logging into the site with a password and viewing your match.

Tips

One problem I came across initially was that being the group admin, I could view all matches. And considering I am also participating in the gift exchange, I didn't want to see who everyone else was paired with.

A way to work around this is to create a separate group member for yourself, outside of your admin user. Then, log out of the site (or use another browser) and log back in as a user account, as opposed to the admin account. This way you only see your match.

But be careful. You don't want anyone being matched up with the other version of you, which is the admin account. Simply exclude all members from drawing the admin user as a match.