Tutorial: Writing Contest – Easypromos - Online Helpdesk

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.

Do you want to allow users to upload multiple texts in a single entry? Would you like to be able to control the frequency of user votes? Do you want to combine text submissions with picture and/or video submissions? With the Multimedia contest application you can also organize a writing contest, taking advantage of all the advanced configuration options that it includes (available only for accounts with an active White Label plan).

The content of the tutorial is as follows:

Customize the design and finish the settings

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 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. How is the participation flow of the user

What will the user experience be like? The promotion is made up of different pages that the user will find when interacting with the promotion to participate, such as: the initial welcome page, the registration page, where the user will register with their data, the final page, etc. As a whole, the different pages will make up the structure of the promotion and the flow of participation that the user will follow to complete the promotional mechanics of the promotion.

In particular, in a Writing contest, the participation flow will be as follows:

1. When accessing the promotion for the first time, the user will access the Welcome page, and when clicking on the main button to start participating, the next page they will see will be the registration form page.
2. The user will need to fill in the form with all the information requested by the administrator, together with the text/story.
3. Once the registration form has been completed, the user will access the final page where the thank you message will appear, confirming that they have registered correctly.

3. Create the promotion

How to start creating the Spin the wheel promotion? We present the following tutorial that will allow you to know the first steps to create your promotion so that you do not miss any important point. You will learn all the general management options that you have available as an administrator in your internal dashboard to manage and edit the promotion.

Discover the first steps to create my first promotion.

4. Set up of the Writing Contest

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

Step 1. 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 2. 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:
Anonymous participations. Activate this if you don’t want users' names and profiles displayed next to their competition entries.

Step 3. 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 4. Enable participation from Instagram (optional)

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

5. 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.

6. 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.

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