  Contests & Activities
This week: Edited by: Sarah Rae  
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The contests and activities on this site are constantly changing! Almost every day there is something new and exciting to view and participate in. The ideas are endless. Some succeed, some manage to get along, while others, unfortunately, are left behind and forgotten. My goal as your Contest & Activity newsletter editor is to provide each of you with the tools it takes to create a great success.
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| ASIN: B083RZ2C5F |
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Amazon's Price: Price N/A
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Recipe: Auction
Below is a "recipe" for making an auction. Feel free to get creative with the recipe. Some of the best things come from expirementing with recipes. We wouldn't have chocolate chip cookies if someone hadn't decided to expirement with putting chocolate into sugar cookies, now would we?
Ingredients:
5-10 Donations
1 Charity
1 Forum
Preparation Instructions:
The preparation of an auction is a little more complex than the other activities. You must gather around 5-10 Donations of reviews, writing.com items, or real life items. The more original the donations, the more of a success your auction will be. Make sure that you accept donations from people who can be trusted. If you're not sure, "Invalid Item" lists several trustworthy members.
Once you have gathered your donations, list them in the forum. Be sure to list what the donation is, who is donating it, and a starting bid, if you wish to include one. Also list the charity the proceeds will go to. As stated in a previous newsletter: "It is up to you to decide who the gift points will go to. The decision of who they'll go to will influence the success of your [auction] (members are more willing to purchase tickets to aid RAOK than to purchase tickets to fund an individual's upgrade)."
When the auction is set up, advertise. Keep an eye on your auction, make sure to advertise items of great interest and items that have had few to no bids. When the auction closes, email the winners and the donators with the results. Be sure to follow up on the donators, to make sure the item won has been awarded.
Cooking Time:
1-2 weeks. Any shorter and you may not have enough time to generate interest. Any longer and members might choose not to bid right away and then forget they ever intended to bid. This is only a suggestion. Several auctions have found success with a shorter cooking time, but I have heard no reports of any auction have success with a longer cooking time.
Reccomendations:
 Keep an uptodate list of the highest bids for each item in your auction. Update it as often as you can. This aids members in selecting their bids. If they have to scroll through posts to find the highest bid for the item of their choice, they might get irritated and choose not to bid after all.
Encourage your donators to wait until the payment for the auction item has been recieved. After a week, follow up with the winner to make sure they have recieved their item. After all, if they do not recieve their winnings, they will blame you as well as the donator and be less willing to participate in any activity you run in the future.
Choose donations carefully. Don't accept the first halfway decent-looking donations and plop them into your auction. Choose them carefully. Take the ones that look most appealing, then thank the other donators for their interest. |
Have an opinion on what you've read here today? Then send the Editor feedback! Find an item that you think would be perfect for showcasing here? Submit it for consideration in the newsletter!
https://www.Writing.Com/go/nl_form
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| ASIN: B01MQP5740 |
Product Type: Kindle Store
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Amazon's Price: $ 4.99
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I submitted one piece to a contest and I did receive a reveiw in regards to that piece but no other acknowledgement after the fact. It seems that only one person read my piece and was the judge for that piece in the contest. However great that judge may be, it doesn't say much for the winners or losers if only one person determines the status of the writing. Is there a way to run the contests so that more than one person evaluates your work? -- starsandy
Greetings! Your question could very well spur a future newsletter.  As it is, I will try to answer it as best I can for now:
When a contest host decides to host a contest, the number of judges involved in the judging process is a choice they make, just as much a choice as the amount of prizes, the deadline, the prompt, etc. Some members choose to do the judging entirely on their own. While this might lead to a bias, it is not uncommon, because it is much easier to judge a contest on one's own than deal with the hassle of getting judging results and interpretting them fairly. Besides, they're the ones awarding the gift points, it's only fair they decide where the gift points go, or so the logic goes. Other members gladly bring a group of judges in to help them, willing to deal with the hassle in order to have a fairer judging.
Remember, though, if your piece loses a contest judged by only one person, it is only the opinion of one member. A piece may lose one contest and win the next. There are many one-judge contests out there, but the chance of a bias doesn't mean you shouldn't put your piece out there. If the one judge has a bad opinion of it, you lose nothing for having tried. Besides, the next judge might like your piece, and you'll win a nice little group of GPs.  |
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Product Type: Kindle Store
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Amazon's Price: $ 12.99
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Contests & Activities: September 13, 2006 Issue [#1263]
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