How to do a Secret Santa draw using WhatsApp

Secret Santa is a traditional game you have probably played on more than one occasion. It is great fun to organize one with your friends and think about what to give as a surprise gift without going over the agreed budget. Traditionally, Secret Santa has been done by gathering a group of people and drawing lots using a series of papers where each one drew one of these papers to find out who they were going to give a gift to. However, new technologies have opened the door to the possibility of making a virtual draw to replace the traditional one, making the process faster and without the need to gather all the people at a given time. In this article, we tell you how you can run a Secret Santa draw through one of the most popular applications in the world: WhatsApp.

How to make a Secret Santa gift exchange through WhatsApp

The famous Meta messaging application constantly receives new functions on top of the ones already available. Thanks to some of these, we now have the possibility of gathering all the communications related to this kind of virtual draw in a single platform that everyone already has installed on their smartphones. In addition, as we will see below, we will use a third-party application to organize the draw that will help us to make the pairings in a matter of seconds. To facilitate this process, we have divided it into a series of numbered steps that you can find below:

1. The first and most important thing you must do is create a WhatsApp group where you must include all the Secret Santa participants. This will help you know the names you will have to enter in the third-party application that we will show you in a while.
2. Once we have all the members in the group, we will use this group to communicate everything related to the Secret Santa celebration, such as the maximum budget, the deadline to confirm the purchase of the gift, and any other rules you can think of, such as the possibility of "stealing" the gift from someone else. This group will also be used by all the members of the Secret Santa to communicate if any kind of incident arises or to confirm their attendance.
3. In addition to this group, we will also need a space to carry out any annotations related to the game. We can use any note-taking application on our device, although, if we want, we can also use WhatsApp for this purpose. The only thing we will have to do is create a group where we are the only participants, and then, we can note in the chat anything related to the draw, such as who confirmed that they already have the gift or who is still waiting to buy theirs.
4. Once we have organized the Secret Santa, all that remains is the most important step: making the Secret Santa gift exchange. As mentioned above, to make our draw, we will have to use a third-party application that lets us make the pairings randomly. If you search the app stores, you will find many apps to do this, but we recommend the Draw Secret Santa app, a straightforward application that, as you will see in the screenshots below, is very easy to use.
5. Once the drawing is done, we will have to communicate to each participant who their Secret Santa is. This must be done individually to maintain the secrecy of the draw, although to make your work easier, we recommend that you create a generic message in which you only have to change the name of the person. As a suggestion, you can use something similar to the following, where you should replace the X's with the appropriate information: "Secret Santa is coming: you got X. Remember that you only have until day X to buy the gift and that the gift budget is limited. When you purchase your gift, confirm it to me with a message."

With that, all that remains is for you to get together and enjoy your Secret Santa. Remember that the rules are already established beforehand, so avoid introducing any last-minute changes that may upset the other participants. Have fun!