The draw is done, the entry file is locked, the random number generator has picked a name, and the winner notification goes out. Then nothing. The email bounces, or it lands and sits there. The phone number on the entry form is one digit off. Two weeks later the client asks who won, and the honest answer is: someone, but we haven’t heard back from them.
Here is the position we’ve come to after enough of these: an unclaimed prize is not an edge case and it is not a saving. It’s a scheduled second draw that most campaigns haven’t scheduled. Of the 176 live Australian promotions on Trevor Services’ tracker this week, 98 are prize draws, and every one of them ends with a winner who has to be found, verified and paid. We don’t publish a redraw rate, and I’d be wary of anyone who quotes you one without showing their entry data, but it happens often enough that we now plan the redraw on day one rather than hope it won’t be needed.
What is an unclaimed prize draw?
An unclaimed prize draw is a second draw held to award a prize whose original winner could not be contacted or did not claim it within the period set out in the promotion’s terms. It is drawn from the same pool of eligible entries as the original draw, and NSW, the ACT and South Australia each require the arrangement to be written into the terms before the promotion starts.
The word “second” is doing more work in that sentence than it looks. A redraw carries the same obligations as the first draw. That is the part that catches people.
How long do you have to hold a prize before you can redraw?
The three jurisdictions that still issue authorities or licences for prize draws each answer this differently, and a national campaign has to satisfy all three at once. (Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania no longer require a permit for a standard trade promotion and fall back on your terms and the Australian Consumer Law; the Northern Territory has its own permit regime for larger prize pools. It’s the three below that write the rules the rest of the country ends up following.)
In New South Wales, NSW Fair Trading’s guidance under the Community Gaming Regulation 2020 says the rules should specify how an unclaimed prize is dealt with, that every reasonable effort must be made to contact the winner, and that if the rules are silent on a timeframe for a promotion that needs an authority, the prize must be held for at least three months before a new winner can be chosen. Perishable prizes can be sold and the money held in trust for the winner, which is a rule written for meat trays but which also applies if your prize is a case of wine with a drink-by window.
In the ACT, the Gambling and Racing Commission’s conditions take a different angle. There is no default holding period. If a prize is not claimed within a reasonable period given the nature of the prize, you must draw another winner, and the method, date, time and place of that redraw must already be in the terms you lodged with the permit application. The same document requires all winners to be notified in writing within 21 days of the draw, and records, including entries, kept for twelve months afterwards. In Canberra the question isn’t “how long do I hold it” but “did I say when and how the redraw happens before I applied”.
South Australia is looser on timing and stricter on paper. Under the Lotteries Regulations 2021, Consumer and Business Services asks that winners get a reasonable opportunity to claim (at least 14 days), that absent winners be told in writing within seven days what they’ve won, that records of any unclaimed prizes and how they were dealt with be kept for at least three months after the draw, and that for major promotions, winners of prizes over $250 be published within 30 days by initial, surname and postcode unless they’ve opted out.
The practical consequence is one claim period in your terms that clears the strictest state you’re running in, a named redraw date, time, place and method, and all of it lodged that way when you apply for the NSW authority or ACT permit. Retrofitting any of it after launch is a variation to the approval, which costs money and time you won’t have if the redraw is already overdue.
Why winners go quiet
It’s rarely because they don’t want the holiday. From the fulfilment side, the causes we see are boring and repetitive, which is good news, because boring and repetitive means preventable. The winner notification lands in a promotions folder or gets filtered as spam, because “Congratulations, you’ve won” from an address the recipient has never seen looks exactly like the phishing they’ve been trained to ignore. The entrant mistyped their email or mobile number on a phone form and nobody validated the field. The winner is asked for identification and proof of purchase to claim, decides the friction isn’t worth it for a mid-tier prize, and drops off. Or the prize is physical, the address on the entry is a workplace they’ve since left, and the courier card goes in a bin.
Every one of those is a design decision made months before the draw. The friction maths that decides whether a shopper enters a promotion in the first place decides whether the winner bothers to claim, too. The Insult Threshold we usually apply to cashback values applies just as well to the effort of claiming a $200 voucher: verifying identity for a $10,000 travel package is proportionate; requiring a signed statutory declaration to release a $50 gift card is how prizes go unclaimed.
The fixes follow from the causes. Validate contact fields at entry so a typo is caught while the entrant is still on the page. Send the notification from a domain the entrant will recognise, ideally the brand’s, and follow it on a second channel: SMS if you have a mobile, a phone call for major prizes. Log every attempt with a timestamp, because “every reasonable effort” is a standard you’ll be asked to evidence, not assert. None of this is clever. It just has to be decided before launch rather than improvised after.
Is an unclaimed prize a budget saving?
No. In NSW, the ACT and SA an unclaimed prize has to be held and then awarded to someone else, so the money is still spent, just later and with more administration attached. This is the exact opposite of cashback, where the claimants who never get around to it are a legitimate part of the economics, which we’ve written up under slippage. Slippage is a feature of cashback. It is not a feature of prize draws, and any campaign plan that quietly assumes some of the prize pool will come back is planning for a breach.
The second cost is the one that gets missed in budgeting meetings. A redraw is a draw. It needs the same locked entry file, the same randomisation method, the same record of who ran it and when, and in South Australia, if the total prize pool is over $30,000, the same independent scrutineer in the room. If the first draw came out of a platform with an audit trail, the redraw is a few minutes’ work and the paperwork writes itself. If the first draw was a spreadsheet and a random number website, you’re doing all of that again, three months later, for a client who has moved on to the next campaign and a marketing coordinator who has moved on to another job.
So the question to put to whoever runs your back end, whether that’s Trevor Services or anyone else, is not “do you handle unclaimed prizes” but “show me the notification sequence, the escalation timings and the evidence you’d hand a regulator”. If the answer is “we send an email”, keep asking.
If you’d like to compare notes on how your terms handle this across the states you’re running in, we’re happy to talk it through.
