I've participated in the referral program since its inception, and while there are a lot of threads complaining about the program, my biggest issues are with the prizes, specifically the "Grand Prize"; the "raffle" to win a top of the line S or X. Many rounds have past and I don't think I know or have heard of any owner WINNING this raffle for the grand prize. Not only that we have no insight into the "raffle" or the winners which is discouraging to say the least. A person referring on average 3 people for the past 4 rounds with an average purchase price of ~$90k is ~$1M of profit to Tesla coming off of owners selling people on buying the car.
That said, here is what I think Tesla can do to fix the Prizes to make them FAIR, and provide incentives for owners to continue to refer and contribute.
1) Tesla Events - Please provide airfare and/or Hotel accommodations for qualified referral winners. To just provide "Admission" to an event isn't enough especially for those not near California, a simple set of economy ticket and hotel accommodations would suffice. Alternatively, a travel reimbursement/voucher would also be useful to making it feel like we've won something useful.
2) Grand Prize - An amazing reason to continue to refer, but we need visibility into this. Please have a streaming event of a raffle like the lottery and allow us to see someone pull a referral code from a cylinder and see who the winner is. I think the referral code is ambiguous enough to maintain privacy for the winner while still showing that someone won. Also, please discontinue the "first to X number of referrals", this is a completely unfair approach as Youtuber's will easily win every time over the owner who gets out to his/her community and has to physically refer people they know.
Lastly and most importantly PLEASE roll over referrals if you did NOT win! The people referring the most people over time should have a greater chance to win over someone who just bought the car. If each referral creates an entry then the people who have contributed the most should have the most ballots in the raffle and that will also encourage them to continue referring. The model 3 is going to add an order of magnitude to the volume of Tesla owners significantly decreasing the odds, so this approach will still allow John/Jane Doe who referred 5 people consistently in every round since 2016 to win the prize he/she has been chasing.
**Another small request would be to provide an email copy of the rewards selected so that the owners have copies of what they chose. This would eliminate lots of emails from people (myself included) that chose for instance Grey Arachnids but received Silver and have not been able to reach anyone to resolve this.
That said, here is what I think Tesla can do to fix the Prizes to make them FAIR, and provide incentives for owners to continue to refer and contribute.
1) Tesla Events - Please provide airfare and/or Hotel accommodations for qualified referral winners. To just provide "Admission" to an event isn't enough especially for those not near California, a simple set of economy ticket and hotel accommodations would suffice. Alternatively, a travel reimbursement/voucher would also be useful to making it feel like we've won something useful.
2) Grand Prize - An amazing reason to continue to refer, but we need visibility into this. Please have a streaming event of a raffle like the lottery and allow us to see someone pull a referral code from a cylinder and see who the winner is. I think the referral code is ambiguous enough to maintain privacy for the winner while still showing that someone won. Also, please discontinue the "first to X number of referrals", this is a completely unfair approach as Youtuber's will easily win every time over the owner who gets out to his/her community and has to physically refer people they know.
Lastly and most importantly PLEASE roll over referrals if you did NOT win! The people referring the most people over time should have a greater chance to win over someone who just bought the car. If each referral creates an entry then the people who have contributed the most should have the most ballots in the raffle and that will also encourage them to continue referring. The model 3 is going to add an order of magnitude to the volume of Tesla owners significantly decreasing the odds, so this approach will still allow John/Jane Doe who referred 5 people consistently in every round since 2016 to win the prize he/she has been chasing.
**Another small request would be to provide an email copy of the rewards selected so that the owners have copies of what they chose. This would eliminate lots of emails from people (myself included) that chose for instance Grey Arachnids but received Silver and have not been able to reach anyone to resolve this.
