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Top 5 Things I Learned From Running a Contest

Hey everybody. All the submission are in and I am in the process of distributing the entries to our judges. This should take a day or so and then the judging process will begin. We will announce the winners as soon as we can. Until then, I wrote my “Top 5 Things I Learned From Running a Contest”

1) Planning Takes A Long Time

Believe it or not, but we have been planning the contest since the end of February and it was announced the first week of April. That was one month of planning! Here are some of the things we did.

  1. Contacting and working with 6 companies
  2. Lining up 3 outside judges
  3. Creating a free advertising program in exchange for prizes
  4. Figuring out how to advertise
  5. Exact wording of the contest (Very Important!)
  6. Legal issues
  7. Getting Everything Approved by Everybody

Those are just off the top of my head. There are plenty more I probably forgot.

2) Choose a Deadline Wisely

We believed having a month to submit entries would be enough. We launched at the begging of April so having an early May deadline would be great! Right? Wrong! By having our first deadline in early May, we missed out on many student submissions. Most students (including me) have final exams in early May and they literally don’t have time for anything else.

3) Underestimating

Today, people lead very busy lives and juggle many things and one month is a very short time to learn MindManager, create mind maps, and submit mind maps. It is even harder to learn Camtasia and MindManager together and create a screencast in a month.

4) You Will Always Miss Something

We thought we had covered all of our bases. After all, we had one entire month of planning. Right? Wrong again! Two weeks into the contest, we were contact by an eastern European website asking if their readers could submit entries in other languages. Oops! We totally forgot to write rules about foreign languages.

5) Get Amazing Judges

We had three outside judges and each has contributed a lot. Gaelen from Mindjet has been with us from the beginning. She helped with each process of the contest and we couldn’t have done anything without her. Betsy from TechSmith, is our screencasting expert and donated the Camatasia software and bonus prizes. And then there is Warner. To us, Warner is a demi-god. All the trackbacks and coverage we received from the big players in the tech industry are because of him. Let’s just say he has connections! Thanks Warner!

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 19th, 2006 at 1:50 am and is filed under Site News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • Sid
    Yeah, the spam got very annoying very quickly. I had to go through all the e-mails manually to pick our the submissions from the spam. I think we are going to delete that e-mail address and never use it again!
  • One additional lesson...

    6. Expect a flood of SPAM.
    A very public email address, like our contest@, gets a TON OF SPAM. You can curb the flow a little with filters/rules/programs, but you can't stop it all. I wish that ISPs and Hosting companies would get IronPort (or similar), rather than simple "greylists", to help curb the volume passed to all their customers.

    It's amazing the lengths the spammers will go through to work around the systems and make sure you get an email. In Japanese, which I can't even read! How effective is that?
  • Some additional comments from AdminID...

    1) Planning Takes A Long Time
    1. Contacting and working with 6 companies
    a. Approaching "Business Partners" can be a Faux Paux. Be careful in how your solicite them, state your independence, and make sure you don't infer that another company is suggesting they participate. I don't think I crossed the line (too far), but I did become aware of it quickly.

    4. Figuring out how to advertise
    a. It's like learning the "slang" of a language! You recognize the words, but are not sure of the exact meaning.

    5. Exact wording of the contest (Very Important!)
    a. Running it by several people can greatly increase the "right" wording. It can take a LONG time to work through it all.

    7. Getting Everything Approved by Everybody
    a. As with any team effort, there will be personal preferences and some confusion. Keep a positive attitude and maintain communication as often as possible.
    b. Doing it on-line with no prior relationships can add a level of complexity not found in a typical conference room environment. None of the people involved had ever met before or even talked on the phone! It all worked out great, but was definetly different than working with known friends/co-worker's personality traits and backgrounds. I would even venture to say it was better than typical conference room planning/meeting sessions... We were always on topic and didn't try to "work the system" to get what we personally wanted.


    2) Choose a Deadline Wisely

    Ditto on Sid's comments. I personally thought a shorter contest was better, but was basing it mostly off my frustration with the MS OneNote PowerToys Contest. I quickly learned how much effort some of our contestants were going through to learn new programs and try to create the best possible entry. A month goes by very quickly.

    5) Get Amazing Judges

    Ditto on Sid's Comments. We really had some amazing help and are VERY grateful.
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