Explanation of Winner! Service participation cards:
This document includes Winner! cards for Friday night through Sunday morning. These actually cover a convention with a Sunday morning Rosh Chodesh service, as well.
I use Winner! cards to assign kiddush, hamotzi, birkat, ark opening/ closing, hagbah, and gelilah. These parts of the service generally do not require preparation, so while a USYer might not sign up for it on a form if it was listed, oftentimes they would still do it if they just so happened to "win" the honor.
I bring the cards with me to every convention. Before everyone arrives, either I or one of the co-chairs put Winner! cards randomly into people's nametags. Of course, it does not have to be entirely random. One must be careful when choosing who to pick for hagbah, for example. Also, I try to choose people who don't usually lead other parts of the service. When the Winner! cards are placed into the nametags, I make sure a list is kept of who received the card for what honor.
When everyone arrives and finds their nametags, I find the people who have the Winner! cards and check in with them to make sure that they feel comfortable doing that part. If not, I just give the card to someone else. I suggest making the cards bright colors so they are easy to spot.
When it comes time for the honor, ideally the list I've kept is accurate and people remember to come up for their parts. Otherwise, I can just use my best announcer voice to say "Will the winner of Friday night birkat please come up and claim your prize?" which generally works.
So far, this has been successful in my region. Some USYers actually beg me to win. At the very least, it is an easy way to get people to step up and lead.
-Emily Mostow, Regional Rel/ed VP, CRUSY