How to set up and run a lottery for your school's programs

When your afterschool programs are very popular and sold out quickly, you may want to offer a better chance for all students to get into a class, instead of first-come-first-serve. In this case, you can take advantage of the lottery options by following the steps below.

• Set the max seats of all the sessions you'd like to run the lottery to 0.
• Update the settings near the bottom of the school profile page from "Waitlist" to "Lottery" > save
• Parents will see the "Enter lottery" button for these sessions on the school portal. If there are some questions that you'd like to ask when the students enter the lottery, you can set up the custom question and check "Need this answer for waitlist or lottery" for the question. Parents will need to answer those questions if they are required. More details about the custom question can be found here. 

• Once the students enter the lottery,  you will be able to check the student list by clicking "Waitlist: #" from the Session rosters page of your school profile (school dashboard > Rosters & analytics > session rosters). 
• Click "Draw a lottery" near the top of the waitlist tab.
• Enter the # of students you'd like to invite, then click "Draw a lottery", it will randomly select the students to be invited, then you can click the "Invite" button to the right of each student to invite them, or click the "Invite selected students" button above the students' names to invite the selected ones all at once.

• The invited students will receive a notification email with a private link, they can follow the link in the email to register for the class.
• Please note that the invited students can register no matter if there are seats available or not, there's no need to increase the max # of students of the session for the invited students to enroll.