Creating Online Contests: Things You Did Not Know

Author: felixstendahl | Posted: 17.05.2012

Imagine being asked to formulate and run an online contest. Perhaps the purpose of the contest is to gather ideas, discover new talent to retain, or find the best solution to your company’s dilemma. If there’s really no one else but you to handle it, how will you do it?

Thankfully, you don’t have to hit your head on the wall figuring out how to run a contest online. Believe it or not, there are solutions to answer that need. If you happen to find more than one solution, you might be asking how to find the one that does everything you need. While it’s not necessarily foolproof, the system or software you seek ought to at least accomplish the following stages.

Design

It has been said that knowing is half the battle. It’s important to know what the contest’s objectives, processes, and desired outcomes are so that the software can be designed to meet them. The software should help you discover key factors affecting administration, such as contest timelines, target audiences, or scores criteria and weighting.

Setup

Once you established the details of the contest, the software should be virtually easy to set up and use to later carry out and gather contest results in a timely and orderly fashion. It must capture contest entries and decide quickly using the standards made from the Design stage. Additionally, it needs to display yet utilize contest-relevant material such as official rules, submission guidelines, and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs). If the software’s developers have an in-house project team, you can retain them to incorporate all the functions into the software for you instead.

Action

Then comes the moment of truth: Running the contest live with as few hitches as possible. The competition software you choose is supposed to give information to contestants, capture and save their submissions, and generate accurate reports while keeping issues – like incomplete entries or tracking of judges’ progress – to a minimum. More importantly, it gives real-time data and tabulated results based on custom-made criteria.

Progress

Finally, the contest software must track things like registrations, results, or contestants’ or judges’ progress to see where and how things stand, especially if nearing deadlines. It should also produce accurate progress reports in relation to the established objectives from the start. These reports can provide helpful insights into the contest’s strengths and drawbacks, as well as how to improve future ones.

Should the software maker offer a team to help design and conduct the contest, take advantage of that. It may cost more, but you’ll have its expertise in making the contest platform successful. Read more about online contests and software at eHow.com and About.com.


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