How to Organize an Online Secret Santa

In offices and homes around the country, friends, family, and co-workers participate in Secret Santa gift exchanges at Christmastime. It's a fun way to celebrate the holidays with some gift-giving fun, without the expense of buying multiple gifts. However, in this electronic age, many people have friends who they only know online, through internet chat rooms and discussion boards. You can run a Secret Santa gift exchange with your online friends too, and here's how!

Getting Started

One person should be the organizer and run the whole exchange. If you find you can't handle everything get a helper, but it's best if only one person does the communicating so that there's no confusion or lost messages. This person should be able to get online at least once a day to field questions or problems (that's where an assistant might be able to help).

Post a thread on your forum to see if anyone's interested. Usually plenty will be, but you want to make sure you have participation before you do a bunch of work. There will be people who have never done this before and will have lots of questions.

Once you know that you'll have enough participants, post a questionnaire for everyone to fill out and send to you. It should include all of their contact information (email, snail mail, phone numbers), likes and dislikes, and a brief profile. Here's one that I've used:

Screen name (required):
Email address (required):
Snail mail with name (required):
Phone number (required, two would be nice):
Hobbies/interests:
Favorite colors/decorator colors:
Your favorite treat:
Chocolate preference (nuts? Milk? Dark?):
Treat no-nos:
A brief bio:
Your clothing sizes:
Jewelry you like/want:
Anything else you can think of/really want:
Your age (or at least a range):

Rules

You're going to have to have some rules. The biggest problem with online secret santas is that it's really easy for someone to disappear and not deliver their gift. I use the following rules in my exchanges and I haven't had any disappointed participants yet!