Organize an online Writing Contest so that your audience can express themselves by writing essays, short stories, poetry or opinions, which you can show in a public gallery so that they can be read, shared, discussed and voted on. You will have a complete management panel to configure and customize the contest to your needs, to manage and moderate all the participations and to measure the results obtained.

The content of the tutorial is as follows:

1. General description

2. Set up of the Writing Contest

• Step 1. Create the promotion

• Paso 2. Participant registration system

• Step 3. Customize the Gallery page

• Step 4. Enable the voting (optional)

• Step 5. Enable Twitter/Instagram (optional)

3. Customize the design and finish the settings

4. Manage and publish the winners

1. General description

The Writing Contest application will allow you to organize a contest of essays, short stories, poetry or opinions to obtain content generated by your users, which you can display in a public gallery and, additionally, enable voting to help make the contest viral. The Writing Contest will allow you to:

• Completely customize the registration form with the data you want to obtain from the participants.
• Publicly display the entries in the contest gallery and enable the voting system so that the entries can be voted.
• Enable participation from Twitter/Instagram to facilitate participation from these two social networks.
• Manage and moderate all entries in order to control which of them appear published in the gallery and are valid for the contest.
• Decide how you want to determine the winner/s of the contest: by votes, through a jury or by a random draw.

2. Set up of the Writing Contest

Here we explain all the steps to create your Writing contest.

Step 1. Create the promotion

1. Access the Easypromos Control Panel and log in with your email address and password to manage and create your promotions.

2. Create a new promotion by clicking the green button.

3. You’ll see a display of the different products available. Choose “Writing Contest”. This option creates a promotion with a user registration form. Users will be able to enter their text in the form to participate.

4. As a next step, set up the following options:

• Organizing brand. As a first step, you should select or create an organizing brand for your promotion. This organizing brand is independent of any social network and works as a folder within your Easypromos account, in order to help organize the promotions that you create.
• Template version. Select which template you want to use to create your promotion: Premium or White Label.

Note: Compare here the features and functionalities included in each template.

5. After clicking on "Continue" button, you'll get access to the Promotion Management Page. You’ll find all the options for setting up your promotion here. Here's a quick rundown of the most relevant sections:

1. Header. This contains the title of the promotion, the version you've picked and other relevant information such as the ID number of the promotion. You'll also see the Promotion status: Draft, Active or Expired. The status also shows if the promotion is about to start. Once the promotion period has ended, this field will be marked in red saying: Status: Expired. You can choose what users see on an expired promotion page.
   
2. Link to the promotion. This is the URL that you should use for sharing on all channels. Learn more about sharing here. There's also a button to automatically copy the link and make sharing simpler.
3. Activate Promotion button. When you have the promotion prepared and ready to launch, click this button to activate it. You'll be taken to the activation page, where you can also review billing information and make payments.
4. Test mode. This tool will allow you to carry out a real test of the promotion before activating it, in order to participate in it as users will when it is activated and thus be able to check that the promotion works as expected before launching it. More information.
5. Side menu. This contains all your options for the promotion.
6. View tutorial. This tutorial guides you step by step through the creation and management of your promotion.
7. Date and timezone settings to control when different stages of the promotion will take place.
   Languages indicates the default language of the promotion. You can edit this if you wish.
   Localization allows you to limit participation to one or several countries. (Localization is included by default). Find out more here.
8. Next steps: Practical recommendations that will guide you through the creation and management of your campaign.

Step 2. Participant registration system

In order to participate in the Writing Contest, users must register by filling in the registration form with the requested data.

To do this, go to the Editor > Pages > Registration Form, to customize the fields that you want to ask users to be able to participate:

You will see that the registration form comes with the "Comments" field enabled. This field will allow users to enter their essay or short story in the registration form. Take advantage of the "label" field to tell users what to write in the field, be it a comment, phrase or story. They can write texts of up to 65,000 characters.

Note: If you are interested you can add the "Media field", which will allow you to ask users for a photo / video to accompany the text and that they can upload from the form. This option is optional.

Check the tutorial where we explain how to configure the promotion registration form.

Step 3. Customize the Gallery page

Configure how the public gallery of images uploaded by participants will look. In this section, you should focus on the following tabs:

1. Contents: You can upload a header image to give the gallery a more corporate touch, and add an introduction message.

2. Layout: Contests use the tiled gallery layout by default, which allows you to present more than one text on the same line. This creates a more visually attractive collage.

You have the following options to configure the gallery layout:

• Decide if you want to use the Tiled gallery or the Vertical gallery.
• Adjust the gallery to your liking. Find out how here.

Note:  You can enable pre-moderation so that the entries are not published automatically but remain as pending so that you can review them beforehand.

3. Options. Here you have the following extra options:

• Entries per page. This option allows to set up the number of pictures displayed per page within the Gallery.
• Order entries. This option allows to set up how you want the pictures to be ordered on the Gallery:
  • Most recent first.
  • Randomly.
  • Most voted first.
• Anonymous participations. Activate this if you don’t want users' names and profiles displayed next to their competition entries.

Step 4. Enable the voting (optional)

Access the "Votes" tab if you want to allow users to vote on entries.

By default, Writing contests come with the voting system enabled. In this section, you’ll be able to set up what type of voting system you wish to have in your contest. You can also disable voting, if you choose.

This section includes many more possibilities:

Step 5. Enable participation from Twitter and Instagram (optional)

Normally, users participate by accessing the promotion app and filling in the entry form. If you want to allow Twitter and Instagram users to participate directly, from within their social networks, you can enable Twitter and Instagram integration. Users can participate by simply posting with your chosen mention+hashtag. 

3. Customize the design and finish the settings

Once you have configured the Writing contest, the next step is to finish the configuration of the other options of the promotion, such as customizing the design template with your own colors and texts, introducing the legal bases, the viral content settings, etc. Check the tutorial to finish the configuration and customization of your promotion.

4. Manage and publish the winners

Easypromos provides a complete Prize and Winners Management system that will allow you to create the prize or prizes that you want to give to the users who participate in the contest, as well as configure how you want to assign the prizes and select the winners.

Specifically, for the Writing Contest you have two ways to assign the prize to the winners, according to your choice:

1. Randomly: You can run one or more draw among participants, or among a segment of participants, and obtain a certificate of validity with the results. Follow the steps of this tutorial to run the draw.

2. Manually: You can assign one or more prizes manually to your chosen winners. This is useful in voting contests and skills tests. We also recommend this option if your winners are selected by a jury, notary public, or the organizing brand. Follow the steps of this tutorial to assign the prizes manually.

Learn how to create prizes and select winners in the Prize management tutorial.