Somebody just volunteered you to organise the office gift swap. Here is the field guide, in the order the decisions actually need to happen.
Set the budget before anything else
Between $15 and $30 per gift is where most offices land. Below that people stress about looking cheap, above that half the team quietly resents it. State the currency, state whether it is a hard cap, and write both into the draw. The budget travels with every private match link, so nobody has to scroll a three-week-old thread to check.
Pick a date the office can actually attend
The second week of December is the sweet spot. The last week empties out with vacations, and a swap where a third of the names are absent in body or spirit falls flat. Anchor the exchange to something that already exists, the team lunch, the all-hands, the Christmas party, and the date sells itself.
Handle exclusions like a diplomat
Couples who work together, the two teammates in a cold war, manager-and-report pairs. Exclusions exist for exactly this: list the pairs when you create the draw and the random assignment never puts them together, in either direction. What exclusions must never do is become public. The organizer never sees the assignments, and nobody learns who was kept apart from whom.
The participation question
Make it opt-in, never mandatory, and say so in the invitation. Ten willing players beat twenty conscripted ones. A free tool with no accounts and no email collection lowers the barrier further: nobody signs up for anything, they just open a link. If your office has that one person who refuses, a "pass" costs nothing.
Run the draw in five minutes
Paste the name list, add the budget and date, list the exclusion pairs, press the button. Every player gets a private link showing only their own match plus a wishlist box. Share the links by direct message, not the channel, or the whole office reads every match. Whoever loses a link gets it re-sent from the organizer page in seconds, all season.
The day itself
Gifts in a pile, one person opening at a time, giver confesses after the reaction. Fifteen minutes is the right length. Longer and it becomes a meeting.
That is the whole job: budget, date, exclusions, private links, fifteen minutes. The generator handles the draw itself in about thirty seconds.