The Entrecard Contest Machine – gears now turning

Written on October 4th, 2008 by Graham

A lot of folks were concerned when we capped credit transfers that it would be an end to contests as we know it in the Entre-Sphere.

Determined to make Entrecard related contests not only live on, but become bigger, badder, and better than ever in the wake of transfer caps, I sought out a Contest Coordinator. Entrecarders, meet Rose. Rose will be handling all your mega contests from here on.

Contacting Rose

First and foremost, if you are holding a big contest, and giving out or collecting more than a thousand credits, you’re going to have to go through the new, official Entrecard contest channel to handle credit collection and payouts.

Contests@entrecard.com is the email address you can reach Rose at for anything related to contests. I repeat: Do not email support@entrecard.com and do not use your dashboard support form for anything contest related.

Contests – how to hold em!

We want you (yes, YOU!) to hold really really big contests. Contests are the heart of Entrecard and we need to make sure the blood keeps pumping through it. We also want to strengthen it. Keep the tradition alive.

To hold a contest, you will need to Email contests@entrecard.com and let Rose know the details about your contest. To keep things efficient, include the following specifics in your email:

1. From what date to what date do you want to solicit sponsors for your contest (if you’re seeking sponsors)
2. From what date to what date will the contest run?
3. What date will the payouts need to be made?
4. What are the sponsorship tiers for Entrecard creidits? In other words, are you asking everyone to pony up 1000 credits or are you asking people to contribute either 500, 1000, or 5000 for bronze, silver, and gold level sponsors?
5. What are the prize tiers? For example, even if all the sponsors contributed 1000 credits, maybe you’re giving it all away in one big 100k credit blast, or maybe two 50k blasts, or maybe 100 1k prizes. Let us know. Considering we’re handling the payouts, we’d rather not pay out a hundred prizes individually, so try to keep the number of winners within reason.
6. What prizes in addition to Credits will be awarded?
7. How will people enter the contest?
8. How will winners be chosen? They must be chosen randomly in some way, even if members receive differing numbers of entries -because we will randomly select the winner through verified random selection methods.
9. How will you be promoting the contest?

So answer the above “contest questionairre” and email it over to Rose. Everyone holding a mega contest will now get a plug on the Entrecard blog, but you still need to promote it on your blog as well (seeing as you will probably want contest entrants to reply to your post on your blog).

Prize Collection

For each contest, we will create a grid of 125×125s for each prize tier. So for example, let’s say sponsors of your contest can choose to contribute either 500, 1000, or 5000 credits. We would create three grids of 125×125s, price the slots these three different amounts, and sponsors would “enter” your contest as sponsors by purchasing one of these ads for credits. The grid would show only on the post about the contest, but we can give you the grid code if you want to promote the sponsors on your blog sidebar/post/etc.

You can handle all non-credit prizes since we have no involvement in that.

Winner Awardment

All non credit prizes you are still in charge of collecting and awarding. The credits that we have collected on your behalf to award to winners will be awarded via our moderator staff. However, we are insisting that for all mega contest, we “pick” the winners using a verified random selection method. So upon contest ending, you would need to send us a list of all the entrants, and how many entries they each have (if someone can enter for more than one entry). We will then pick the winners, send the list of winners to you (so you can notify them, and award all non-credit prizes) and we will then award the credit prizes.

Not Complicated

So all this might sound complicated, but its really not. Basically, you’re just emailing contests@entrecard and giving them all the info about your contest. Then we both post about your contest and get lots of people to sponsor the contest and enter the contest. We handle all the collection credits and we also handle the picking of the winners. You handle distributing non-credit prizes to winners and sending us the list of the entries so we can pick winners randomly.

Waiting for you

We are ready and waiting for your awesome contests to start! Why not hold a big one this month? After all, there is no better way to aggressively increase your linkbacks and traffic!

31 Responses to “The Entrecard Contest Machine – gears now turning”

Leave a Reply