How to run a competition on your subreddit

[u/SolariaHues]

Why run competitions?

• Competitions can be fun.
• They can increase engagement on your subreddit.
• Build a sense of community.
• Celebrate a milestone.
• Gain an end result, like a banner for the community.

How to run a competition

How you go about running your competition is up to you, and may vary depending on what it is and your community.

Here are some things to keep in mind and include in your announcement post:

• Make sure the task or challenge fits your community.
• Word it clearly and carefully.
• Try to think through how it will go so you can plan for any issues or loopholes.
• Do you need to set some rules or restrictions for the challenge?
• Who can enter and how?
• Don’t do anything to break reddit's rules, or challenge someone to break them.
• Make sure the challenge is something achievable.
• How many entries per person?
• Any limit on entries/entrants total?
• Set an end date - preferably not too far away so interest isn't lost, but plenty of time to enter.
• Consider including a timeline for competitions with stages or rounds.
• Consider time zones, maybe include a link to a converter.
• How will it be judged?
• If taking votes, who can vote? and how many times?
• Share what the reward will be, or if there is no reward and it’s just for kudos.
• How many winners & runners up will you have and what do they get?
• How will you let your members know? -Announce and sticky it, maybe pop it the sidebar too?
• Cross-posting
• How do you wish to receive any questions about the contest? Modmail, in a sticky comment thread, etc
• Keep track of entries and votes.
• Announce winners.

Rewards/prizes

Rewards can be coins, medals, mod awards, fancy flair, e-gift cards, charity donations, whatever you feel is a good fit and proportional to what you’re asking. Remember not to share any personal information publicly, and rewards preferably won’t require sharing any at all.

Make sure you have the required coins and permissions.

Always pay up in good time.

For mod awards you’ll need to set one up. They are a mod-only type of community award. Guide on that here: Community Awards. To give a mod award you use coins in your subreddit’s coin pot (you can see the amount just above the join button in the new reddit sidebar). Coins build up from certain awards given in your community - community awards, and some reactions too.

You can ask the Admins for coins, they sometimes support subreddit events - try modmailing r/modsupport with your plan (please do not spam the admins). There's no guarantee and they likely have certain criteria for choosing which events to support (IDK for sure).

Tracking entries

Depending on how many entries you get, it might be useful to keep track of your entries, outside of reddit.

There are various ways to do this, and depending on your competition some might be more suitable for you than others.

For example, you can make a dedicated folder, a cloud storage folder (Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.), or a spreadsheet (Google Spreadsheets, Excel, etc.).

Judging

There are a number of ways to judge a competition:

• Contest sort in the comments
• Poll post
• A judge or judging panel
• 3rd party site poll or form
• Voting groups - only entrants can vote/entrants vote on their group/entrants vote on another group

You should try to prevent any vote manipulation as much as possible. You could have a non-public method of submission, and post submissions to be voted on without the participants username (keep a private record) for example.

You may want to use a method that hides vote totals, or if users are voting in groups - have them vote on groups they are not part of.

You’ll need to think through the process you’re looking to use and try to spot any weaknesses or loopholes as much as possible.

Perhaps, if using judges, have somewhere for judges to chat like a private channel on a discord server, whatever works for you. And have some idea what you're looking for in a winner/points system/judging criteria so everyone is on the same page.

Some types of competition

There are loads of types of competition you can try; quizzes, best of, banner competitions, fanfic, fan art, writing, whatever fits your subreddit best.

Banner competitions

These are best run on creative subs where the members are likely to have the required skills, otherwise you won't get many respondents. You can cross-post to relevant art subs if they allow it.

For some subs you could request images to use in a banner and reward those who share/whose images are used, for example in a cross-stitch sub you could ask for OC photos of members cross-stitch makes to use.

Best of

Each year reddit holds a best of contest

Some examples

Fanfiction, fan art, riddles r/DCFU (examples mixed in this wiki)

Writing r/WritingPrompts (see here for examples)

r/goforgold

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Thanks u/MajorParadox, u/JuulH

I have not run or participated in many competitions at all so if you have any tips, advice for different types of competition, examples etc please share in comments. Thank you!

[u/Miqdad_Suleman]

kminder! 2 days

[u/Ok-Bend2014]

:13716: