This week: Transparency Edited by: Jeff  
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"When you compete against yourself, no one wants to help you.
But when you compete against yourself, everyone wants to help you."
-- Simon Sinek
About The Editor: Greetings! My name is Jeff and I'm a guest editors for this issue of the official Contests & Activities Newsletter! I've been a member of Writing.com since 2003, and have edited more than 350 newsletters across the site during that time. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me via email or the handy feedback field at the bottom of this newsletter! 
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Transparency
There's a lot that goes into designing a good contest or activity. The organizer needs to take a lot of factors into consideration like how often to run it, what the prizes should be, and what makes theirs different from other similar offerings out there. Big creative decisions like that are critical for any community activity, from the largest fundraisers and once-a-year contests down to the smallest of one-off activities or recurring daily contests. But there's another component of designing contests and activities that comes into play, and that's the "backend" operations. Basically, the nuts and bolts of how you run it.
Whenever this topic comes up, most people will point to clear "rules" as one of the most important factors. They're not wrong; it's incredibly important to have sensible, established rules and guidelines to let potential entrants know what is expected of them. Submission deadlines, word count limitations, item types or genres that are accepted, prompts that need to be followed... all of these are important considerations to lay out in your item to avoid confusion or complications.
What I want to talk about this week, though, is a different aspect of the backend of running a contest or activity, and that's the concept of transparency; the idea that how you run your activity is easy to understand and/or open to public scrutiny. In general, unless you have a very specific reason why it needs to be private, operating your activity in a publicly-accountable way is really helpful to reassure members of the community that you can be trusted to hold up your end of things as a contest/activity organizer.
One of the most frequent complaints the site receives is from members who won a contest and never received the promised prizes, or who submitted an entry to a contest where the organizer just disappeared and never go around to even judging the contest. There are sometimes even complaints about members running fundraisers for a specific purpose only to use those funds for some other purpose entirely (another group, a personal account renewal, etc.). In a lot of cases, those situations could have been avoided with some increased transparency.
Communication is the key here. If you're going to be late judging your latest contest round, tell the entrants that you're going to be late. If you've decided to extend the deadline at the last minute to accommodate additional entries, tell the entrants that you're going to extend the deadline. If you're going to run a fundraiser to pay for someone's membership and find out that for some reason they no longer need that membership, tell the people you raised funds from that you're reallocating the GPs to another purpose and why. If you're collecting funds for more than one purpose, articulate how the funds will be split among those purposes. For example, if you're doing a fundraiser to help renew your membership and also award prizes, it's often helpful to include a detail like, "50% of the funds raised will go to my membership and the other 50% will go to X." Or even, "all profits once prizes are given out will go to renewing my membership." If you're comfortable with it, you can even make a group's GP balance and GP log visible so you can show anyone who's interested exactly how funds are being received and spent.
The key is to be clear from the outset how you're going to handle the operation of your activity. Where hard feelings and bad experiences start to occur is when participants feel like they were misled, or where they feel like the rules of the activity are being changed on them at the last minute. The better you can communicate your intentions and follow through on them, the less likely you are to have problems with your contests/activities.
It's also important to note that reputation plays an important role here. If you've been a member of the site for a long time, are constantly around, and have a track record of running contests or activities without issues, you're far more likely to have other members cut you some slack when you're late with prizes, or have to make a last-minute change... because they know they can trust you to do the right thing. If you're newer to contest/activity organizing, it's a good idea to build a rapport with other members and establish a reputation for being consistent with your activities before you ask others to take it on faith that sudden changes or going MIA for a little while will be understood and accepted.
The next time you're thinking of organizing a contest/activity, I'd encourage you to give as much thought to the backend operations and transparency of things as you do to the creative elements. And the next time you're thinking of participating in a contest/activity, I'd encourage you to really examine the thought that's gone into how it's being run, and to ask any clarifying questions of the organizer before you spend a lot of time and energy participating in something that you'r unsure about.
Communication and transparency are the cornerstones of avoiding conflict in your contest and activities, for organizers and participants alike.
Until next time,
Jeff
If you're interested in checking out my work:
"New & Noteworthy Things" | "Blogocentric Formulations" |
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Contests & Activities: August 17, 2022 Issue [#11516]
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