In our last blog we mentioned that apps can be a good source of prize draws. Litterlotto for example gives you the chance to win cash prizes when you demonstrate you’ve been tidying litter. Coca Cola run free games where you can win various goodies whilst McDonald’s now use their app in their big promos such as Winning Sips and the up and coming Suprize Fries. Another app you might want to consider adding to your mobile phone is The Great British Raffle. It describes itself as “the ultimate destination for UK players to win free cash prizes every week”. According to the owners “winning is not just a dream but a weekly possibility – all at no cost”. It sounds too good to be true so we thought we’d take a closer look. By the way this may well be a bad move because everytime we review something like this it inevitably ends up closing. Quid Squad, Competitions Live and Akatyak are just three sites that we’ve blogged about but that now no longer exist. Let’s hope that’s not the case this time round!
Getting Started With The Great British Raffle
The Great British Raffle is an app from Kepithor Studios. They have other apps such as Kingdom Karnage, KKT Faucet and Enj Excavators. To get started you need to download the app and install it on your mobile. Once installed you’ll then need to register your details and login. The content of the app isn’t that inspiring. A big blue splash screen welcomes you to the site and explains how the app works. Note that the yellow text on the blue screen doesn’t link to the sections, such as chat, referrals etc, that they highlight. It’s also not evidently clear what you need to do when you first login. However at the bottom of the screen you’ll find a video icon with 1/1 by it and a speaker icon with 20/20 by it. These are where you click to activate adverts, and adverts are how you get tickets into the daily raffle. By the way when you join via our link you’ll automatically receive 20 free tickets. To get extra tickets you can complete one video advert a day for one ticket but you can complete 20 audio ads for 20 tickets. The video ad lasts around 30 seconds whilst the audio ads run for around 10 seconds. Another way to earn tickets is by referring friends and when they win you win (which is why we hope you’ll use our link). There did used to be a Sudoku game but that’s been removed.
What Can You Win?
The prize for each daily draw seems to be a £10 voucher. According to the app “when you win you receive an email with a link to choose from a list of available Gift Card providers such as Amazon, Asda, John Lewis and Google Play. Results for each day’s draw are featured on the app under ‘Results’ but if you follow The Great British Raffle on Twitter then the winners are also posted there alongside information about any referrer winners. The app also has a leaderboard that shows the top 50 ticket holders although we’re not sure what purpose this achieves because we guess most players will try and collect all available daily tickets and there doesn’t seem to be any prizes for topping the board. A chat facility used to be part of the app’s make-up but that too has gone the same way as Sudoku. Instead you’re invited to chat with other players and the community via a Facebook Group or Telegram. We don’t use the latter but both groups currently only have 14 members. To be fair the group has only been going a few days although there’s been no engagement from The Great British Raffle in response to questions that have been asked.
Should You Play The Great British Raffle
If you’ve a spare few minutes and don’t mind rattling through some adverts on your mobile then download the app and start playing The Great British Raffle. It’s free to play so really there’s nothing to lose. The raffle earns revenue from showing adverts so we’re guessing it needs to hit some level of critical mass to make things viable long term. In order to get that critical mass they need more players but more players means less chances to win too. Presumably as the audience grows The Great British Raffle will add more layers to the user experience, a bit like Pick My Postcode. However we did find it a little bit boring. We see enough adverts online daily already and there’s not a great deal to login too now that Sudoku has gone and chat is on Facebook. We’re also not convinced people want chat facilities because social media already takes care of that. Loquax has hundreds of visitors each day but only a handful actually use the forum to chat – and even fewer comment on the blog posts. So where could the app go in the future? Someone has asked on Facebook whether there are other plans for the app other than watching ads but TGBR haven’t responded. Daily games along the lines of those that you find on Coca Cola’s app would help inspire regular returns.