SuperLucky LIVE raises £4,895 for Chestnut Tree House!

On Saturday 26 October 2019, 165 compers joined me at Brighton Clarendon Centre to celebrate ten years of SuperLucky and raise money for my local Children’s Hospice, Chestnut Tree House. It was a fabulous day!

SuperLucky LIVE was conceived about this time last year – so many compers were asking me to host an event, and with my blog’s ten year anniversary looming I thought it would be the perfect celebration.

I started visiting venues in my hometown of Brighton and decided on the Clarendon Centre – then I recruited a team of wonderful helpers. I’ve known Marie, Julie, Vic and Jan since we met at a Nottingham comping day 20 years ago, and we had already organised 3 successful Midlands comping days between 2007 and 2010 so I knew they had the experience. Nuala, Sue, Dee and Andrea from my local Brighton Breezy competition club eagerly volunteered to help out – I recruited my good friend Laura, and 2 of my local mum friends Lesley and Fran also joined the team. I promised to pay them all with a SuperLucky t-shirt and dinner at Wahaca, and amazingly they agreed.

Because we all lived so far apart, most of the prep was done via our Facebook group, then we gathered at my house the night before the event to fill goody bags.

The big day!

The day kicked off with a cuppa in the reception area – it was super to see so many familiar faces from all over the UK – with several compers flying in from Scotland for the event! Jan and Vic greeted the attendees and made sure everyone was handed an envelope with their programme and entry form.

Up in the main room, we’d laid tables with name stickers, the Chestnut Tree House newsletter, Lucky notebooks, PromoVeritas pens and a SuperLucky LIVE postcard for the selfie competition.

Lucky envelopes

I wanted to ensure that every one of my guests left with a prize – and my solution was to give everyone a coloured envelope which allowed them to claim a treat! Raffle tickets were tucked into green envelopes, with a prize of a competition qualifier, yellow envelopes won a bundle of stamps and postcards (quallies and postcards both donated by Compers News). Blue envelopes won £5 Cashback (thanks to Quidco), purple won a Lucky Lines scratchcard, red won a £5 Tesco gift card and finally, orange envelopes won a £5 Love2Shop voucher (courtesy of Latest Free Stuff).

Wall of Wins

To kick off the day I asked an icebreaker question – what’s your favourite competition win? This got everyone on the table chatting about their best prizes. I asked them to scribble it onto a Post it note and stick it onto our Wall of Wins. Reading them was fantastically inspiring – the prizes ranged from cars and trips to Las Vegas to vegan toothpaste and a cement truck! Later on I peeled off ten notes at random and they all won a Cadbury Chocolate stocking (well, it was actually a purple welly sock, but don’t tell anyone…)

Book stall

Jordon and Ollie took charge of the book stall – with copies of my 2019 edition of SuperLucky Secrets for sale alongside Overcoming the Odds: How I won £50,000 of prizes in three years by Rebecca Beesley, Secrets to Saving: The Ultimate UK Couponing Guide by Jordon Cox – and also a few copies of When Losers Don’t Quit – Reflections of a part time winner by Neill Johnstone, all signed by the authors!
(#ad – these links are my Amazon affiliate links!)

Live Quiz

Somewhat ambitiously I decided to trial the latest Easypromos quiz format at SuperLucky LIVE – Corinne from EasyPromos had come along to help out with any technical hiccups. Participants had 5 minutes to visit the easypromos.live website, pop in the game PIN and register to play. They were then challenged with 5 multiple choice questions related to prize promotions – anyone who got all 5 correct went into a prize draw to win an Amazon Echo Dot. The reveal of the answers was thrilling – at the end of Question 4 there were still 2 left in the game! Unfortunately they BOTH got the final question wrong. What should have happened is that we should have seen a list of everyone who got 4 correct in order of fastest time – but as we stood looking at a blank screen we realised something had gone awry!

Luckily we realised the entrants had their final time on their phone screen, so we invited them up, and arranged them on stage in order of fastest time. Tony was the winner, and the 4 next quickest times won an EasyPromos goodie bag. Corinne took notes and no doubt they will be looking into the glitch at Easypromos HQ in Spain as we speak!

Tips from top compers

When I asked SuperLucky readers what they would expect from a comping day, many of them told me that they wanted to learn tips and tricks. As well as sharing some of my own suggestions, I contacted some of my favourite successful compers, including Jane Willis, Carolyn Wilman (Contest Queen), Kev Francis (President of the London Competitors Club) along with members of my Lucky Learners group. They shared some fantastic tips which I showed on the big screens during the event – I’ve uploaded the slides to YouTube too, you can see them below!

Di’s Prize Buys

Spending time browsing the supermarket for comps is a big part of many compers’ lives, so I knew I wanted to feature it at SuperLucky LIVE. I’m also a big gameshow fan so I combined the formats of two of my favourite gameshows – The Price is Right and Supermarket Sweep – and turned it into Di’s Prize Buys (sponsored by Shopmium). I invited the brilliant Jordon Cox to be host – and he did a fabulous job!

Three contestants answered questions about promotional products, competitions and the Shopmium cashback app. It was neck and neck until the final round – then Bradley managed a couple of super spins on the wheel and won himself the top prize of £100 cashback on his next grocery shop! Charlotte and Connor didn’t go away empty handed though – they each got £50 Shopmium cashback too.

With a little bit of audience help, Bradley answered a bonus question correctly (how many White Creme Eggs were hidden in the UK this year?) and bagged a Cadbury hamper too! During the gameshow the audience had to estimate the value of the basket of qualifiers in order to win it – with one table just a few pence away from the correct answer of £38.04. 

Lunch & cupcakes

Despite the world’s biggest queue for lunch, the buffet was enjoyed – and followed by a special SuperLucky cupcake, made by HannahMakesCakes in Hove!

Comping panel chat

After the break we settled into comfy chairs for a Q&A session with Jeremy Stern (PromoVeritas Managing Director), Steve Middleton (Editor of Compers News magazine) and Emma Gough. We chatted about whether brands are becoming more environmentally conscious with their prize choices, how PromoVeritas do checks to prevent cheating in comps, organisational tips and embarrassing comping stories. Emma shared some great tips for Twitter (add GIFs and photos, add more to your feed than just comps, have a pinned post and change your profile photo regularly were just a few) – and we all agreed that voting competitions are a nightmare! From the questions asked, Charlotte was chosen to win a £25 One4All voucher.

Surprise anagram competition

Nobody suspected that there was a cheeky little competition hidden in the pumpkin candleholders that were on each table! Tucked inside a sheet of black paper were 8 anagrams – each one a Halloween phrase. The first team to solve them and shout BOO would win! Now, I must admit I made one of these anagrams INCREDIBLY difficult – but I needed a ten minute break from the stage to get organised so I didn’t want them to solve it too quickly!

I’ll leave them here so you can play along at home:

Number 5 was the toughie – the clues I gave were ‘Halloween’ and ‘movie’. Can you figure it out?

After a few incorrect answers we finally found our winners and rewarded them with 8 boxes of Thorntons chocolates!

Di’s Prize Unboxing

This was the moment I’d been waiting for! I wanted to see how the compers would cope opening a mystery prize on camera – and they were fantastic!

I invited my son Ryland to judge the prize unboxing along with the lovely Nikki (Glam and Geeky), who I was so excited to finally meet!

Contestant number 1 Linda wasn’t too sure about her prize – she had no clue what it was! It was actually a Gorillapod, a mini bendy tripod which means you can take selfies easily wherever you are! But the entertainment value was high and the judged awarded an 8 and a 9. Helena was next, and again was bewildered by her prize of a football-shaped power bank. ‘But I don’t use the internet or have a fancy phone!’ she laughed!

Sally took the stage next, and revealed her prize to be a long blonde wig which she modelled for the audience. The judges also gave both Helena and Sally a total score of 17! Our final contestant Rachel unboxed a Japanese Lucky Waving Cat, but it didn’t impress our judges quite as much and she scored 16. As we had three unboxers tied for the prize, the judges scored again, revealing Helena to be our overall winner. She won a £75 pre-paid Mastercard, and Sally bagged £25 for being runner up – thanks to Latest Deals for buying the four prizes and gift cards.

I couldn’t resist giving Nikki and Ryland prizes to unbox too – Nikki got a BTS Jimin doll and Ry was awarded with a Guinness World Records Gamers Guide, and a Playstation gift card!

Watch a couple of unboxing clips on my Instagram story!

Charity raffle

The raffle was rather an odd experience after all the hustle and bustle – the room went deathly quiet as everyone waited for Andrea to read out their lucky numbers. Prizes ranged from a vegetable peeler to an iPad!

Having been traumatised by previous raffles, I’d actually made a slide in Photoshop showing all the different colours in case there were issues! And if you’re wondering, well wouldn’t it be easier to just print white raffle tickets for people to write their names on? Well there’s a certain mindset with raffles, and if you offer people multiple colours they generally want to buy tickets in AS MANY colours as possible – which of course, means a lot more money raised for charity!

Siobhan was our top prize winner in the raffle – and went home with a brand new iPad!

Face painting

Next was an extreme comping session – each table was given a face paint palette courtesy of Smiffys, and ten minutes to paint one of their team’s faces in the most creative way. The eighteen volunteers were promised a £10 Love2Shop voucher each for their bravery!

The level of creativity for this was amazingly high – check out some of the entries below!

After closely inspecting the contestants on stage and on the Instagram #SpookyLuckyLive hashtag, our judging team Ollie and Marie awarded the prizes of eight £25 Love2Shop vouchers – courtesy of Loquax – to this terrifying creature:

SuperLucky winners

As the event drew to a close, I announced the rest of the competition and prize draw winners.

Quidco gave us two £50 John Lewis vouchers to award to the winners of the most creative tiebreaker (judged by Steve and Jeremy), plus three Hotel Chocolat prizes for runners up! The winning entries were:

I am super lucky because… winspired by Di, comping friends galore. Prizes a-plenty, can’t ask more! (Sue Matejtschuk)

I am super lucky because… freebies, fun and friends I make, Prizes are cherries on the cake (Teri Barham)

In the morning I gave every guest and team member a SuperLucky LIVE postcard to take a selfie with – from all the tweets shared with #SuperLuckyLiveSelfie on Twitter, Jeremy chose four at random to win £25 Tesco vouchers – including Cynthia, who had travelled all the way from Australia to join us (do they have Tesco in Australia…?)

Last but not least, we drew the winner of the Apple Watch (donated by Gleam) – lucky Ben!

Cheque presentation

At the end of the day, we presented a giant cheque to Charlotte, who had joined us from Chestnut Tree House. She was gobsmacked at the amount we managed to raise – an incredible £4,895. A huge thanks to everyone who bought tickets, and all the prize donors (see the full list here).

We sent all the attendees home with a special SuperLucky shopper bag, full of freebies from Virgin Red, JAR Project, Oppo Brothers, Easypromos, Compers News, Puzzleworld, HMA Creative, Ark Designs, Del Monte, Nestlé, Debenhams, Shopmium, Paladone, Mediavine, O2 and Hallmark – plus a special thanks to the amazing Katies Bookshelf for making up 175 Usborne goody bags the day before the event!

After packing up, I took the team out to Wahaca for a well deserved cocktail and a lovely dinner. We congratulated ourselves on a massive success – but agreed there would be NO mention of another SuperLucky LIVE for at least six months!

Thanks to everyone who helped to make this such a special day – you can also see more photos and video clips in my Instagram story highlight and on the Super Lucky Facebook page!