Minecraft Blogs / Tutorial

10 Steps to organizing a successful contest on PMC!

  • 6,743 views, 3 today
  • 162
  • 128
  • 93
DinowCookie's Avatar DinowCookie
Retired Moderator
Level 70 : Legendary Dinosaur
4,552
Checklist for reference.
CategoryBuilding, coding, skins, textures, art, writing...
ThemeBroad theme (ex: history) or specific theme (ex: queen Elizabeth)?
RulesNew or pre-made? # of entries? Teamwork allowed? Posting format? Limitations?
DeadlineWhen does your contest end?
PrizesOptional! Trophies, custom creations, gift cards...
Judge methodWho judges? Why them? What are the judging criteria? Originality, technique, theme...
PromotionPost to the events section on the forums. Event Calendar, wall-posts, example submission, banner...
EntriesCollect them all in one place, like a table on your forum thread or in a collection.
JudgingCalculate points, have a discussion among judges or just pick your favorites!
WinnersAnnounce the winners on your forum thread, a new forum post or wall-post. Don't forget the prizes!

Planet Minecraft is great place for members of the community to host their own Minecraft-related contests and events. Hosting a contest can be great fun! Contests are a way for members of the community to interact, to try their very best and to be inspired to create something new. Some contests are more popular than others, which is mostly due to how well they are organized. In this blog post I will share the steps to hosting a successful contest!


1. Choose your category


Contests can be hosted for any category. Skin and building contests are the most common, as well as writing contests. You could also choose to hold a mod contest, texture contest or drawing contest. As long as it's Minecraft related, it can be done! Pick the thing you are personally most interested in. Just make sure to explain to your participants which category your contest is for. Also keep in mind that one category has more creators and thus potential participants than the other. There are more skin creators than mod creators and more builders than people who write poetry.


2. Give your theme some thought

Picking a theme can be tricky. You have to decide whether you want your participants to have a lot of freedom in what they make, or if you want them to make something very specific. An example of a very broad theme for a skin contest is "Historical figures" while an example of a very specific theme is "Queen Elizabeth I of England".

When people are free to interpret a broad theme, they can put a lot of creativity into their work. This freedom can result in more entries compared to specific themes. Though, beware of themes that are so vague and so broad that people have no clue what is really expected of them to the point where they don't want to take part. Having a broad theme also means that you will get a broad variety of entries to judge, which can be a bit like comparing apples and oranges. Personally I really enjoy seeing a broad variety in entries, I find it great fun to think of a theme and then see people do something completely different with it from what I had expected.

Choosing a very specific theme can also result in a lot of entries. It can attract participants who find it hard to come up with ideas of their own and it can also challenge people who normally do one and the same thing to try something new for a change. For example, by hosting a contest themed "a modern house", you could inspire people who normally only build medieval themed houses to try something different for once. A specific theme can also help if you really want to see more of a certain thing. For example, if you are looking for a cool cyborg skin to use you could host a contest with cyborg skins as a theme. Just like choosing a theme that is too broad, you can also choose a theme that is too specific. Hosting a contest for people to build a house or create a skin from a specific movie that is not too well-known would probably not interest people who haven't seen the movie, which will result in not many participants if any at all. Choosing a specific theme makes judging easier because you're comparing apples to apples.


3. Set boundaries: rules!


A clear set of rules is key to hosting a successful contest. It is important that you don't over-regulate. Too many specific rules might scare people away. But you do need a few rules to avoid confusion. Here are some common questions which you will want to answer with your rules:
  • Can participants submit more than one entry and if so, how many?
  • Can multiple people work on the same entry or must it be made by one person?
  • Can participants submit previously made work, or must each entry be newly made?
  • Where must people upload their submission and where/to who must they submit it?
  • Are participants allowed to update their entry after they submitted it?
  • Can entries be disqualified and if so, when and why?
  • How many winners will there be?
Of course, all the rules of Planet Minecraft also apply to any entries. It is nice to point this out in your contest rules as well, but there is no need to re-write all the rules that PMC already has. Also please keep in mind that you may not require participants to subscribe to you, to follow you on social media or to do any similar action as a rule in your contest.


4. Choose a good deadline

There's more to choosing a deadline than just arbitrarily picking a date. The most important thing to keep in mind, is how much time some people might need to finish their submission. Making a skin may not take as much time as building an entire town or programming a mod. Make sure to give people enough time to finish the thing you ask of them. But also make sure that your contest does not run for too long, because participants are often eager to know if they won soon after they finish their entry, so if the contest runs for too long, people may lose interest in entering. Personally for skin contests I always try to run a contest for at least two and at most four weeks.

Another thing to keep in mind for deadlines is which day the contest ends. During the weekend a lot of people don't work or go to school, so it might be wise to have a deadline on a Sunday so that people can make last-minute entries. Also keep holidays in mind; it's not wise to have a deadline during the middle of Christmas for example, because during those days many people are busy with other things than Minecraft.

Try to be rather strict about your deadline. Once you've set it, don't change it unless you have good reason to. Reasons to extend a deadline might be something that has come up in your personal life, or if you truly do not have enough entries yet. In any other case it is wise to stick to your deadline as much as possible, because current participants are eager to learn the results. This is also why you need to keep in mind the availability of the judges when choosing your deadline. Don't have a deadline the day before one of the judges goes on vacation!


5. Think of some prizes (or not!)

Prizes are not the most important thing in community contests. Of course they can be fun, and it's a nice way to give back to the community. It's better not to ask people to share personal information like addresses, so using physical items as prizes to send to the winners is not a good idea. You could however offer a steam gift card or similar digital prizes for your contest. But there are plenty of free things you can give away as a prize.

You can create a nice participation badges and trophies that your contest participants and winners can feature on their PMC profile. If you're a creator yourself, you can offer one of your custom creations as a prize to winners; this could be a skin, a drawing, a build or anything else you're good at making. You can ask other creators to donate their work as a prize in your contest as well. Another thing you can do as a prize is promise winners to feature their creations someplace, like on a widget on your profile or your personal website. This is a nice prize when you have a lot of followers/subscribers. Keep in mind that you may not offer diamonds, likes, favorites, notification spams and similar actions as prizes in your contest.

In my personal experience, people don't mind taking part just for the fun of it and for the honor and bragging rights of winning. So don't hesitate to organize a contest if you don't have much to offer in terms of prizes. It can still work out just fine! :D
Also keep in mind that a bad prize is worse than no prize at all. Nobody wants a terrible looking trophy or badly made skin as a prize, so if you know your creations aren't so great then you might not want to offer them as a prize. Personally I've sometimes chosen not to enter in a contest because I really did not want to be ungrateful about a prize that I didn't really want to win.

Like I mentioned earlier it is important to make clear how many winners there will be. You can choose to have just one, you can have a top-3 or you can let the amount of winners depend on the amount of entries.


6. Determine your judging method

  Selecting judges
You don't have to host a contest entirely on your own. It's nice to have at least one or two people to help you out with managing and judging. It is nice to decide who the judges of a contest will be in advance, so that participants will know who will be judging them. It can play a part in whether people choose to enter or not. Looking for judges while the contest is already running can come off as messy and incomplete.

Try to invite people as a judge who are great with the category in which the contest is held. Holding a blog contest? Ask a professional writer. Holding a skin contest? Ask a winner from the official contests. Holding a build contest? Ask the leader of a successful build team. It's better to ask someone who knows their trade, than to ask someone because you like them. Having good judges will give participants a feeling that their entries are judged by someone worthy. You can even choose to not be a judge in your own contest and ask other people to judge for it instead.

For fair judgement, it is nice to have at least two judges. Don't have too many judges either though, because this will likely slow down the judging process at the end of the contest. Also make sure you or the judges don't compete in the contest themselves, and don't allow them to give feedback to participants on their entries before the deadline. This would be unfair.

Choosing criteria
It is always good to be open and clear about the judging process. This means it is good to let people know who the judges are, but also to let participants know which points will be taken into account in the judging process. This can have effect on whether people want to enter or not. The four most commonly used points are:
  • Originality: has it been done before?
  • Technique: is the entry well-made?
  • Readability: can you see/understand what it is?
  • Compliance: does the entry follow the theme well?
Of course you are free to choose which of these points you want to take into account. Some examples: With a skin contest, you could choose to only judge based on originality. For a writing contest, you can choose whether spelling errors will count in judging or not. In the end the most important part remains that your participants know which points their entries will be judged by.


7. Post and promote your contest

Contests on PMC should be posted in the events section on the forums. This is where you can create a new thread for your contest. It's also where people look for new contests. Keep the description of your contest brief and to-the point, people don't want to read through a wall of text in order to participate. Use colors to highlight the most important things and use bullet points for your rules. Make sure to clearly describe the theme, the rules, the deadline, the judging process and the prizes to your participants. Format your forum post in a clear, easy to read manner and make good use of paragraphs. Avoid spelling errors as much as you can too, because it can come off as messy. Posting a contest in just a few sentences will come off as effortless so don't make your description too short either.

It is nice to have some visuals with your contest too. Make a banner, logo or any other kind of image to go with your contest. Personally I like to use a website called Textcraft which lets you generate nice looking Minecraft fonts. It's a nice and easy way to create an image but you can do it in whichever way you like, as long as you don't plagiarize images. PMC member Chiaroscuro has a free Feature Image Shop on the forums, and a great tutorial on how to create your own. Nice visuals make a forum post attractive looking and will give potential participants the feeling that a lot of care and effort has been put into the organization of the contest. This can result in more entries. The recommended banner format is 1070x275 pixels which is suitable for the pop reel.

How to: easy contest banner!

How to add an image to a forum post
1. Upload your image to a website (image-host) like imgur if it is not on any website yet. You need an image url (link), which you can get for almost any image on websites by right-clicking it and choose "copy image location". Find a more detailed tutorial for getting an image url at this link.

2. Click the "Insert/edit image" button on your forum post editor and paste the url (link) in there in the "Url" field under Insert link.

10 Steps to organizing a successful contest on PMC!

Done! :D

To promote your contest, you can share your contest as a wall post on your PMC profile. You are also allowed to post an advertisement in the PMC chat every 15 minutes so you can choose to share your contest there as well. Another thing you can do to promote your contest is to create a submission that follows the theme of your contest (not an entry, just a promotional creation). Then you can link to your contest in the description of your creation. You can ask your judges to do the same thing. There is also the Community Event Calendar, which lists all currently ongoing PMC community events. You can leave a comment on that forum topic for your contest to be listed (if it isn't listed already!).


8. Collect the entries


It can be tricky to keep track of entries for your contest, especially if there are a lot of them. The best way to make sure you don't miss a single one, is to appoint one place in your rules where people are allowed to turn in their entry. Personally I always want people to PM me or respond in the comments on my forum thread. You can also ask people to use a specific tag in their submission so that you can easily find them through the PMC search function. Beware that some people might forget to do this, though.

To keep all the entries in one place, you can create a collection on PMC which you can add them to. What I personally like to do is also add all the current entries to my forum post with their image so that future participants can see what others have made. Seeing other entries can also inspire new participants to create an entry, so it's certainly worth your effort. Before you start judging, make sure to check if you didn't miss any entries.


9. Judge the entries


The judging process can be done in whichever way you like, as long as you stay true to the points you promised to judge by. You can choose to have each judge score every entry with points, to have each judge pick their top 3 and compare those, or to pick winners in a discussion with all the judges. Make sure that your choice of winner is not biased in any way by whether you personally like a participant. Judge solely based on the entry they submitted!

Speaking of bias, judging entries is not always easy. Sometimes it's comparing apples to oranges and subjectivity also plays a big role, especially with more artsy and creative themes and categories. When judging, try to remain as objective as possible and don't let your personal tastes influence your judgement too much. Always justify certain choices; "because I like it better" is not a valid reason to prefer one entry over another. (Unless you promised to judge by your personal taste of course.)

The faster the judging process, the better, because participants don't want to wait forever to know if they won. That's also why I mentioned earlier that you need to keep the judges availability in mind when setting a deadline. You could even choose to set a deadline for when the judging process has to be finished so that your participants know what to expect.


10. Announce the winners

You can choose to announce the winners in contest's forum post itself, or to create a dedicated forum post for this. When announcing your winners, it is nice to include some images of their work in your announcement. You can choose to just list the winners but what would be even nicer is if you can say something about why these entries were chosen as the winners in your contest. You can write what you found great about the entries and why (according to your judgement) they were the better ones. This is both nice for the winners to read, as interesting for people who didn't win because they might learn something from it. As soon as the winners are announced, you should make sure that each winner will get their prize(s) as promised.


Additional tips
  • Be polite as a contest host. Thank people for their entries, answer questions in a polite manner and don't be rude about lesser quality entries. Keep in mind that a lot of users on PMC are children, and they may need a bit of extra explanation or help. Be patient and remain calm at all times.
  • Check your contest regularly to see if there are any questions asked, entries finished or other things to be dealt with.
  • If you don't know how to deal with a certain participant, entry or any problem you run into, contact a moderator on PMC or another, more experienced member to ask for advice.
  • Don't organize a contest if you are looking for a certain creation to be made. If you have a request, ask for it in the workshop on the forums instead, or PM a creator who is open for requests.
  • These 10 steps aren't the only way to organize a contest. You can have a different concept for a contest and do things completely differently if you wish. This is just the way I like to organize them, and a way I experienced to work well. Use my tips in any way you find useful, but don't let them limit your choices and ideas.

Thank you everyone who has made it to the end of this rather lengthy tutorial. I hope it will be of use to you, and I hope to see more community contests in the future. Please do feel free to link any contest you organized in the comments below because I would love to have a look at them and maybe even take part!

If you have any questions about this blog post or about organizing contests and events in general, feel free to send me a PM and I will see how I can help you. :)
Tags

2 Update Logs

Checklist! : by DinowCookie 02/24/2020 9:58:16 amFeb 24th, 2020

Added a checklist at the top of the blog-post for quick reference. 😁
LOAD MORE LOGS

Create an account or sign in to comment.

1
01/13/2022 10:12 pm
Level 29 : Expert Artist
EliGamer987
EliGamer987's Avatar
disculpen ¿ como hago trofeos de imagenes o pixelarts?
1
01/13/2022 10:14 pm
Level 29 : Expert Artist
EliGamer987
EliGamer987's Avatar
que ise un una vez un concurso y queria agregar ese tipo de trofeos :<
2
12/28/2021 12:21 pm
Level 8 : Apprentice Crafter
Frisk_guy
Frisk_guy's Avatar
thx
1
12/15/2021 9:49 pm
Level 29 : Expert Artist
EliGamer987
EliGamer987's Avatar
tengo una duda :I
3
12/04/2021 6:46 pmhistory
Level 34 : Artisan Dragon
Gigagleam
Gigagleam's Avatar
I read everything, but I would like to know how to make a trophy...
1
09/27/2021 6:17 pm
Level 27 : Expert Dragonborn
Jozum5
Jozum5's Avatar
this is very helpful im thinking of making one for 20 subs even though it may not be a lot its kinda a big milestone
1
08/07/2021 11:09 pm
Level 43 : Master Herobrine
B1rdz
B1rdz's Avatar
"...a lot of users on PMC are children,"


"I am 13 years or older": Am I a joke to you?

IDK Maybe its just children that use their sibling's account, who knows.
(Were under 13 people allowed on PMC back then?) (Why do I point out random things lol)
2
08/08/2021 10:47 am
Level 70 : Legendary Dinosaur
DinowCookie
DinowCookie's Avatar
I would surely consider 13+ to still be children 😅
Otherwise we never know who makes an account an falsely checks the box.
1
08/10/2021 10:33 pm
Level 43 : Master Herobrine
B1rdz
B1rdz's Avatar
so people under 18 would be considered children on this website?
understandable, because they arent adults.
3
07/04/2021 7:14 amhistory
Level 36 : Artisan Nerd
George Washington
George Washington's Avatar
how do you make a custom trophies for a contest? never mind paint.net is broken service cant get into it.
Planet Minecraft

Website

© 2010 - 2024
www.planetminecraft.com

Welcome