Does Emailing or friending then giving a gift have a faster turn around time?

Hello. To be honest, I prefer sending them a friend request, only to ensure that they'll activate the gift and then mark the giveaway as received. That's not fast though, but better safe than sorry. xD

Usually people respond to my friend requests faster than by email. That is just my experience though. :)

Thanks so far for the feed back so far

Just tends to be harder starting out.

There are always gonna some situations where someone could activate their key immediately and chooses not to, but I sincerely believe most often people actually do activate it as soon as they're in a location to do so and they actually noticed they received the key..

Since you can't control one of those things, I think fastest to slowest method essentially depends on influencing how quickly they see the key. It still depends on where the person looks more often, but I think it's usually fastest through SG, then through steam requests, and email last since there are a lot of ways things get tied up.

With email it's just so easy to overlook something even when you're keeping an eye out for it, especially if you get a lot from steam/humble/etc. And it might be a site you're not expecting (say indiegala's email feature) or the spam filter can eat it in any situation etc.

One thing I've noticed people can do to speed up that process. is using the "send key" part of your giveaway to write something like "emailed from groupees"

But keep in mind... method can still be totally irrelevant when the biggest factors still depend on the person. Doesn't matter where or how often you notify the winner if it's someone's bot on a throwaway card-account, showing they're online 24/7 when they only check here once a week. Not that any scenario you encounter will be near that insidious or even lack absolute good intentions all around. Just some absolute worst case situation to highlight that sometimes there really is just nothing that can be done other than wait. It gets a lot easier soon though.

Just be patient? There's no hurry. Trust me, there will be plenty of giveaways next week too.

I emailed winners at first, but now I just add everyone on Steam. If they can't figure out why I added them, that's their problem. :)

One advantage of adding people... Sometimes a winner has a friends-only profile, so if you add them you can verify they didn't accidentally win a game they just bought or something. :)

FWIW, some folks might be annoyed by a friend request or email, when they can just get the key from the giveaway (if it's a key, not a gift). That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, but some consider it an "intrusion" (not me of course). Most people will be fine with it.

Most likely I would use the email option because based on my experience I got blocked when I sent in a friend request which slows down the process of sending the gift to winner. But yeah, so far I have gifted like only 13 gifts, I can't really tell if that's helpful to you. if you look at my ratio you could say that I'm a "leech" xD

Some people never check their Email, I'm one of them.

Edit: you can type "SentToEmail" at the Key section.

I appreciate the feedback so far :)