Karie Herring of TheFiveFish.com has written a response to our post on giveaways being rigged. She suggests that most giveaways mom blogs host fall under the sweepstakes category, which has federal and state laws that govern how they ought to be run.

The giveaways we routinely see happening today may at some point be barred and slapped with the "illegal lottery" label - which are highly regulated and fined in the U.S.

We decided to look up the rules and found Karie has some valid concerns. The stickiest point is the method for entering a sweepstakes - under federal regulations there are several major no-no's including: (i) requiring purchase - which is why you always see "no purchase necessary"; (ii) asking for disclosure of unnecessary personal information; (iii) requiring extensive navigation of a website; (iv) acceptance of future advertisements for entry or (vi) anything falling under the category of consideration.

The key point here is that it has to be very simple for anyone to enter and you cannot require something that is beneficial to the sponsor (or host). Any unneccessary barrier or benefit would change it from being a sweepstakes (which is based entirely on chance) to being an illegal lottery.

It's common practice for bloggers to give extra entries for things like subscribing to their RSS feed, tweeting about the contest, finding a product on the sponsor's website they like, hosting giveaways on private sites, or requiring an answer to a sponsored trivia question. However, if giveaways fall under the sweepstakes category then requiring any of the above is illegal - and although bloggers may not be fined yet, we as a community should be proactive and consider the kinds of policies we want to promote as best practices for our industry.

There were some great suggestions on our original post about the best ways to select winners - including the verified draw system on Random.org, which starts at $4.95 and would prevent any accusation of bias. That sounds like $4.95 well spent. (And yes, bloggers could require companies hosting giveaways on their site to provide them with a third-party drawing service.)

These laws are not common knowledge, so this is not an indictment on individuals but rather a collective call to action for us to all do better.

We hope this ongoing conversation inspires us all to consider what the best practices for giveaways ought to be. Lots of us have made mistakes but those choices don't have to define our community if we choose to improve and opt to better self-regulate.

Perhaps the Blog With Integrity folks should facilitate a wider discussion and help set some industry standards.

{photo credit: Muffet}