Camp lottery: ranked requests, the draw, and results

When a camp season has a lottery open, camp weeks for that season aren't booked first-come. Households submit ranked requests, and a single draw allocates every seat at once. This article covers the mechanics staff need to explain outcomes to parents accurately: how the draw treats siblings, why a cancelled seat's credit doesn't post right away, and how "must be together" carries through once entries reach the waitlist.

Lottery is run from the Lottery tab on the Camp page. Not from Settings. That tab is where you Create lottery for a season (with its open and close times), Open and Close the request window, Run the draw, reopen the window, and create the next season's lottery. (Settings holds only two lottery-adjacent values, both dollar/deadline policy rather than an on-switch: the days winners have to pay, and how long a backfill credit stays good.) While a season's lottery is open (accepting ranked requests) or awaiting the draw, ordinary first-come registration is fenced off for that season entirely. There's no way to jump the queue by registering directly. Once the draw runs, any leftover capacity can open to normal first-come registration.

Camp row-control updates do not change the lottery draw or request window. Families can prepare waivers from Camp checkup: open each camper's Read and sign row and check the season. Signing one waiver does not submit a lottery request or sign for another camper.

During the request window, households submit a ranked list of the weeks they want. Not a race to click first. Order matters (their first choice is tried first in the draw), but submission timing within the window doesn't.

The draw is a seeded, reproducible allocation: it shuffles households with a stored seed (so the same draw can be re-verified later. The seed lives on the lottery row) and allocates seats in rounds, working down each household's ranked list.

The demand table on the Lottery tab shows seats left next to each week's capacity. Seats left is capacity minus the seats already taken (staff registrations, sign-ups from before the window), and it is the number the draw can actually hand out — read that column, not capacity, when judging how oversubscribed a week is.

Every seat the draw grants goes through the exact same capacity-checked registration path as any other camp booking. That means the draw itself cannot oversell a week, even against a concurrent staff registration happening at the same moment.

Results emails are queued, not sent while you wait

When the draw finishes, the confirmation says how many households the results were queued for — not how many were emailed on the spot. The allocation itself is already final and saved at that point; the results emails go out in the background over the next few moments, one per household.

This is deliberate. A draw covering a few hundred households cannot send a few hundred emails inside the one click without timing out partway down the list — which would leave the seats granted but only some families told, with no way to see who got a message. Queuing them means the outcome is decided once and the delivery is retried on its own if the email provider is briefly unavailable.

What this changes for you: don't re-run or re-open a lottery because the emails haven't landed yet. Give it a few minutes, then check the message log for a specific household the way you would for any other email.

Sibling "must be together" groups

A household can mark a group of siblings as needing to stay together on the same week. At draw time, this is honored as an atomic unit:

• A together-group is granted a week only if the week has room for the entire group at once.

• A group that can't be fully seated is marked lost as a whole. The draw does not seat some siblings and leave others out.

This guarantee also carries through to the waitlist once a group loses the draw. See Sibling groups on the waitlist, below.

A lottery win does not mean "due today." Winning freezes the invoice's due date at a configurable number of days from the draw (configured in Settings, default 7 days). That gives winning households a real window to pay before the unpaid-seat sweep can touch the seat. See Camp for how that sweep works and its own safeguards (off by default, warning email first, never touches a part-paid or ACH-in-flight seat).

Households who don't win a seat for a week are seeded onto that week's program waitlist automatically, in the exact order they lost the draw. From there, the waitlist behaves like any other camp waitlist: offers go out as seats free up, in position order.

The week's empty state, “No campers on this week's waitlist,” only describes that queue. It does not confirm that every applicant has a seat.

The "must be together" guarantee carries through past the draw, not just at it. When a seat frees up on a week that has a together-group waiting, the offer sweep treats the whole group as one unit:

• The group is offered together, every member gets their own offer/token, only when the freed capacity fits the entire group at once.

• If it doesn't fit yet, the sweep skips the whole group (keeping their queue position, logged for staff), and tries the next waiting entry instead. Exactly the same "all or none" rule the draw uses.

One thing this doesn't guarantee: once offers go out, each sibling still has to accept their own offer individually within its expiry window. The platform doesn't force a joint accept. If a parent misses the window for one child while confirming for another, that's a separate expiry/timing issue, not a togetherness gap. Walk through the timeline with staff before promising a fix.

When a household cancels a lottery-won seat, the credit does not post immediately, even though the normal camp refund tiers still compute a value. Lottery-source cancellations are gated on backfill:

1. The seat is released and offered down the waitlist as normal.

2. Credit is withheld until a waitlist household accepts that seat and pays its invoice.

3. Only then is the original canceller's credit issued, as a camp-scoped credit on their household.

4. If the backfilling household's payment is later reversed, the issued credit reverses too.

This is different from a non-lottery camp cancellation, where credit posts on the normal tiered schedule right away. When a parent asks why their lottery-seat cancellation credit hasn't shown up yet, this backfill wait is the expected reason. Not a processing delay to escalate.