The high stakes of sweepstakes
Sweepstake and contests are fun, until they aren't...
Hey founders et al. In today’s edition, we explore the legal do’s and don’ts of running sweepstakes and contests. As always, we also highlight great attorneys and tools in world of marketing, advertising and beyond.
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Sweeps and Contests
Sweepstakes and contests can be great promotional devices for developing interest and creating buzz around your brand or product. Examples can include customers entering random drawing for a prize via an online form, submitting photos or user-generated content online in a competition, earning points by re-sharing social posts media, or even competing in a treasure hunt in real life physical locations for prizes.
However, creating a successful sweepstakes or contest requires attention to detail, including the legal details. All your efforts could go to waste if execution is sloppy, the rules are not clear, and the promotion runs afoul of state or federal laws. The administrative and operational details for even the smallest sweepstakes or contest should not be overlooked, even if you want to move fast.
I wrote a guide on Notion that discusses legal and operational considerations. I think it’s a must read (no bias). But remember, if you want to run a compliant sweeps or promo, chat it over with an attorney :)
Tools and Resources
There are some excellent marketing and advertising legal resources out there surrounding promotions that founders may not know about. We are always adding to this list. See the full list of resources here.
Start with why: Knowing the goals of the promo beforehand will help you to determine (1) whether the benefits of the specific promo will likely justify the cost and effort, and (2) whether the promo was successful in the end. A great resource to read before moving past this stage is this guidebook provided by Viral Sweeps. It isn’t a legal guide per-se… but it will help you plan out your promotion a bit better so that you can have a fruitful conversation with a lawyer when the time comes.
Templates: It seems like there are a billion sweeps/contest T&Cs templates out there. I go over some of them in my guide on Notion, but I’d like to pull out my favorites here (not legal advice, I just like the UX/UI):
For sweepstakes: Priori
For contests: Rocket Lawyer
Wanna deep dive? This article by Jones Day should do the trick. It’s a pretty easy read on the legal risks involved with these types of marketing tools. If you’re gonna go through the trouble of setting up a promotion, at least give this a good skim.
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Lawyer Spotlight
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“Christian and the Integral Business Counsel team did most of the work in our last financing round and will likely do it again for the next round. He’s been an outstanding attorney for fundraising and he has very reasonable rates.”
Reviewing founder profile: B2B SaaS, 10-25 employees, Series A
Work done: Fundraising
Integral Business Counsel is a full-service firm, representing entrepreneurs and companies at all stages including emerging, mid-size, and large companies. As a boutique firm with agility and flexibility, IBC provides this new breed of legal service at extremely affordable rates. Thanks Christian and the IBC Team for being founder friendly!
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Thanks for reading. Stay lawyerly.
Brian