Official rules

What the document is for

The official rules are the contract with entrants. They are also the first thing produced when anyone — an entrant, a regulator, a payment provider, counsel on the other side — asks how the promotion works.

That second use is what people underestimate. A rules document is read adversarially or not at all, and it is read against the product as it actually behaved. Every gap between the two is found in that reading.

What it has to contain

Written as a checklist of what an operator has to be able to answer, not as a form to fill in.

• Who is eligible, and who is excluded — by age, jurisdiction and relationship to the sponsor.
• The entry period. The component that a continuously running product cannot state in the form the drafting assumes.
• Every method of entry, including the free one, described precisely enough that somebody could follow it without help.
• The odds, and how they are determined.
• What the prize is and what it is worth.
• How winners are selected, notified, and what happens if one cannot be reached.
• Whether winners are published, and how somebody obtains the list.
• Who the sponsor is — a named legal entity with an address.
• Governing law, and where disputes go.
• The no-purchase statement, in the rules as well as everywhere else it belongs.

The rule that governs all of them: the document has to describe the product that exists. A component that is accurate at launch and untrue by the second quarter is worse than one that was never there, because it is evidence.

Abbreviated rules, and where they appear

The full document lives at a stable URL. The abbreviated form travels with the advertising, and it is the one that carries the no-purchase statement into the places where somebody is actually being persuaded.

The enforcement record is entirely about that second form. Nobody has been penalised for a full rules document that was hard to read — they are penalised for advertising that pushed the purchase while the free method was fine print. Disclosure parity is judged where the marketing is, which means the abbreviated rules are a marketing artefact with legal consequences, and they should be reviewed by whoever reviews the marketing.

Keeping rules current on a product that never ends

Sweepstakes rules were designed to be written once for a promotion with an end date. A live product changes weekly, and the document has to keep up without becoming untrustworthy.

What that requires in practice: a version and an effective date on the document itself; a statement of which version governs an entry already made; and the discipline of publishing a change rather than editing quietly. Silent edits are the specific failure — a document that has been changed without a trace cannot be relied on by anyone, including the operator relying on it.

Note the tension with Florida’s filing regime below, which requires rules filed in advance and provides that they “may not thereafter be changed, modified, or altered”. A product that ships new mechanics monthly and a statute that freezes the rules at commencement were not designed for each other.

Registration and bonding

Three US states require a sweepstakes to be registered before it runs, two of them also require the prize pool to be secured, and there is no fourth. All three were written for a promotion with a beginning, an ending and a total announced in advance — which is not what a live product is.

What each statute actually says, the four things widely repeated about these regimes that the statutes do not support, and what the mismatch does and does not mean for an operator are set out in full on registration and bonding, where each regime is read against its own text. This page defers to it rather than restating it, so that the figures live in one place and cannot drift.

Not a template

Every competitor in this category offers a downloadable rules template. We do not, and the reason is not modesty.

A generated rules document describes a promotion nobody ran. Its value is entirely in the drafting — in the specific decisions about eligibility, entry limits, prize description and governing law that only somebody who knows your product can make — and a template is precisely the artefact that removes those decisions while looking like it has made them. The documents that fail under scrutiny are almost always the ones that were adapted rather than written.

What we will do is tell you what has to be in it, which is above, and tell you when your product has changed in a way the document has not caught up with.