Public House lottery tools are designed to support transparent, fair, and defensible housing lotteries. While the tools are highly configurable, they are not custom-built for individual use cases. This means there are structured options you can choose from—but the underlying process and logic are intentionally standardized.
Why Standardization Matters
Housing lotteries require public accountability. Public House standardizes the workflow and rules so results are fair, explainable, and auditable, even when the ranking is randomized.
What You Can Configure
The lottery tools allow for flexibility in:
- Type of lottery (weighted or non-weighted)
- Eligibility criteria and documentation requirements
- Additional entries (for households that meet specific criteria)
- Opportunity-specific filters (e.g., household size, income bands)
These are all built into the system for consistency and control.
What You Cannot Customize
To protect fairness and auditability, the lottery workflow does not support:
- Custom ranking logic or weighting formulas outside supported options
- Skipping required verification steps
- Manually reordering entries
- Adding one-off rules that are not supported by the platform
Customizing Communication Templates
Public House has 8 communication templates dedicated to lotteries. Each template has a fixed format with a dedicated section for organizations to add custom text and links. The fixed format ensures the emails look and function great and include all the essential information and links.
Bottom Line
Housing organizations often have unique local goals or legacy practices. However, lotteries must be conducted using the standard framework to protect both applicants and housing providers.
If you need a rule that is not supported, document the requirement and share it with support@public.house. We use that feedback to evaluate improvements to the platform.
Volume Limitations
There's a daily limit of 5,000 emails. If you are sending the rank and lottery completion notifications for a larger lottery, those may need to be staggered over multiple days.
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