Gravity Forms
+ Random Pairing & Group Draw

Sign-ups for a holiday gift exchange, a coffee buddy program, a mentoring scheme or a workshop are easy to collect with Gravity Forms. The hard part comes afterwards: someone has to match the people. Drawing names from a hat breaks as soon as there are rules (partners in the same household should not draw each other, colleagues from the same team should meet someone new), a spreadsheet takes an evening, and every person must learn their own match without seeing anyone else's. The Gravity Forms Random Pairing & Group Draw add-on does all of this from the entries you already have.

Choose what to draw: a gift exchange (one big circle or several smaller ones), random pairs (with one trio or one person left out when the number is odd), mentors and mentees (roles from a field, a match score from the fields you choose, a number of places per mentor) or balanced groups of a chosen size, spread evenly by a field such as department. Add rules: never match people who share a household or team, never match two hand-picked people, always match two others. If the rules leave no possible draw, you get a plain explanation, for example that six of nine people share one office, instead of a silent failure.

Every draw starts as a preview that you can re-draw as often as you like. When it looks right, publish: the draw is locked, the result is saved on each entry, a "Draw published" notification can e-mail every person their own match, and a signed personal reveal page shows each person only who they are matched with plus the fields you allow, such as a wishlist. A CSV export and an audit log with the time, user and random seed of every draw complete it. Everything runs on your own server. For Gravity Forms 2.9 and newer.

The add-on reads the active entries of the form you pick (spam and trash never take part) and turns each one into a person with the field values your rules need. Your rules become a list of allowed matches. The draw then searches for an arrangement that keeps every rule: it tries random arrangements first and keeps searching until it finds a valid one, so a draw that is possible is always found. Before it searches, it checks the numbers: if one household has more than half of the people in a gift exchange, if there are more mentees than mentor places, or if some people can only be matched with too few others, it tells you exactly which values or people cause the problem. Mentor matching adds up a score per possible match from the fields you chose and picks the best total; equally good choices are drawn at random. Randomness comes from your server's cryptographic generator, and the seed is stored so the same draw can be computed again for an audit. Publishing writes the result to each entry with the Gravity Forms API and runs your "Draw published" notifications once per person, so every e-mail only contains that person's own match. Personal links are signed with a secret key: changing a single character, or another person's entry number, is refused. Everything happens on your own server — the add-on makes no outside HTTP request beyond the licence and update checks.