Are you looking to do a spinner wheel in Zoom that can pick audience members as a winner?
I'm going to show you two ways to do this.
- One way where you don’t need to upload any audience lists
- One way where you have to manually upload an audience list
Either approach works just fine, but depending on your requirements you might choose one or the other.
Let’s look at the first way where you don’t need to upload an audience list but still pick a winner using a wheel of names spinner.
1. Use StreamAlive to run a wheel of names contest in Zoom
Benefits
- Free and easy to use
- Audience is automatically added to your wheel - no uploads required
- Ad-free experience
Drawbacks
- Not a big drawback, but you do need to allow a Zoom-vetted and approved-for-use bot to enter your meeting
The downside of most online spinner wheels is that to pick a member of your audience you need to upload the names that it needs to pick from.
Have you ever tried to export a list of Zoom participants during your meeting?
It’s a lot to do when you have so much else going on.
The easiest way is to use StreamAlive’s spinner wheel for Zoom. It automatically adds the people in your Zoom session to the spinner wheel and picks a name at random.
How StreamAlive’s wheel of names works
StreamAlive connects to your Zoom meeting as a bot - or you can use the free StreamAlive app for Zoom, which is a Zoom-approved app that you can add on to your Zoom account.
If you are familiar with Zoom notetaking apps like SuperHuman which have to join your meeting in order to take your notes, you'll have a good idea of how StreamAlive works.
It enters your meeting as a bot and reads the chat stream to turn messages into fun and engaging audience interactions like polls, wordclouds, interactive maps, and of course, spinner wheels.
The presenter (that’s you) needs to share your screen to show the audience the interactions that you are running. As your audience types in the chat, the interactions update in real-time on your screen.
When you run a wheel of names contest, StreamAlive automatically adds all the audience members to the wheel. The wheel spins and a winner is picked.
If you need to pick more than one winner, you simply remove the previous winner from the wheel and re-spin.
You can even go one step further and say only people that have engaged in the chat are eligible to be entered into the wheel of names. Or only people that interacted with a poll or word cloud.
Experience how StreamAlive’s wheel of names would work in your Zoom session, or if you’ve seen enough already, sign up for your free account.
2. Use a third party online spinner wheel
Benefits
- Free and easy to use
Drawbacks
- Manually upload your list
- Spinner wheel website is full of ads which are shown to your audience members
- Hundreds of tracking cookies placed on your computer
The alternative to using StreamAlive’s wheel of names within your meeting is to use a third party tool. There are loads of them available online, just search for “online spinner wheel” and take your pick.
The biggest advantage is that they are free and easy to use if you have a list of names ready that you want to be added to the wheel
All the spinner wheel websites work the same way: You need to have a list of names that you upload and only then will the spinner work.
There’s no way to automatically reward only your most active audience members, or only enter specific people into the spinner wheel. You have to edit and curate that list first, and then upload it.
You are the product
The reason that there are so many free online spinner wheel websites is because they can make money from advertising.
One spinner wheel website I visited wanted to place over 100 advertising and tracking cookies on my laptop.
Most spinner wheel websites look like a Times Square billboard with ads everywhere. For casual meetings this might not be a problem, but if you’re being retargeted by Amazon based on your shopping or browsing habits you might have some uncomfortable ads show up in front of everyone!
Although StreamAlive offers a free forever plan, we don’t place cookies or use ads to support the free product. Our costs are offset by the paid plans which mean we can offer a free version without ads.
Which spinner wheel for Zoom should you choose?
There's no right or wrong answer here. It's which ever option suits your requirements. Some people will appreciate the ability to run spinner wheels without doing any admin work and choose StreamAlive. Others will be happy to upload lists and put up with lots of ads when they spin the wheel in front of their audience.
