Running contests and giveaways is a common tactic for the promotion of goods and services. However, those contests can be an unwieldy business process. Manually promoting the contests could wind up making them an expensive endeavor, and then notifying contestants of the results, as well as personalizing all those messages also risk communication difficulties. Time lost and communication hazards encountered are roadblocks that should be avoided wherever possible.
The contests and giveaways solution for educational institutions serves to eliminate these issues. By making use of a suite of interconnected tools, it can answer each of these challenges with a single tool.
With an automated solution that makes use of QR code technology and online forms to simplify contest entry, contests can be conducted easily and effectively. Messages can be automated up until manual input is required, and information remains easily organized. What's more, automated rule setting can allow for repeated contests without having to worry about contact details becoming disorganized.
This solution also includes a dynamic way to communicate to staff that a decision needs to be made regarding the contest. By allowing for responses, the automated system can notify the winner at the appointed time and allow them to contact staff and collect their prize.
If this sounds complex, that’s fine. Here’s an example to make it easier to follow:
ABC University has several contests running leading up to the academic year. They need to share these contests with their students and they also want to ensure that contestants who are selected as winners can enter into other contests without issues. For management reasons, they also need to be able to track the results of a given contest easily. The database can track all interactions with a contact on their contact profile.
The university could do all this by manually posting the contest online and around campus and sending out personalized emails to every contestant. The problem is that this requires an incredible amount of time for staff – both to manually maintain the contest, and to create personalized communications and reminders. Not to mention the time it would take management to verify a paper trail during audits or inquiries.
Instead, they could use an automated solution where they simply need to fill out virtual forms to begin the contest process and use automated messages to confirm participation, update contestants, and inform the contestants of the contest’s result.
Without a doubt, this automated option saves time, paper, and makes the overall process more efficient and easier to update. This solution is even located in one central platform so universities don’t need to sort through layers of paperwork or multiple online tools.
How to Set Up a Contest and Giveaway Solution
The most critical step of setting up an automated contest and giveaway solution is having a strategy. The staff also need to figure out the set of tasks needed to build the process, and find the right digital tools to build the best contest process possible. It is often intimidating to do this since it involves substantial technical labor and skills.
Fortunately, universities do not have to build this solution from scratch.
SimplyCast anticipated the growing need for a suite of education tools and built a ready-to-go system that can be customized for every university.
All you need to do is to follow these basic steps to get your contest and giveaway solution ready:
Step 1: Sign Up Contestants
The core of this process is your signup process. Manually tracking contestants can be both time consuming and arduous, so ensuring that the signup process is easy, automated, and makes contestants feel valued is of paramount importance to ensure participation.
There are several ways to handle it and no matter how you choose to get contestants into the central database, personalized signup confirmations and thank you messages can be sent. If you like, you can even post reminders for contests, and send different engagement tasks to contestants to earn more entries!
Step 2: Trigger Staff Action
Once the entry deadline has arrived, it’s time to create a task for the staff to designate a winner. The task can be created automatically by the solution at the appointed time. Once the task has been completed, the staff can complete it to trigger further automated processes such as sending an email to confirm that a winner has been selected.
Step 3: Notify Winner
Winners can be selected via a tag to the contestant profile and they will receive an automated email, while the rest of the contestants are thanked for their participation. The winner can respond to the email that they receive to arrange receipt of their prize, allowing for a manual reward process.
Step 4: Reports
No process is perfect the first time. Reporting allows you to look at the process and see what issues you might have. This can range from delivery issues to a lack of message opens, or even negative responses regarding the contest. Surveys can be done because of reports that might help to illuminate issues that contestants experienced as well. All of this can be used to further refine the contest process.
Why SimplyCast?
We have a complete, digital engagement-powered contest and giveaway solution.
As mentioned before, it is completely customizable technology so you can tweak the solution to meet your organization’s specific requirements. We have used our in-house marketing automation tool and incorporated our SMS, email, voice broadcasting, and CRM software to build this solution.
Don’t worry about scalability and security! SimplyCast is an ISO 27001:2013-certified company with data centers in the USA and Canada. This means we can assure you that your confidential data is safe on our secure server and the messages you transmit are completely encrypted. Our platform has the capacity to send nearly 100,000+ messages every hour and allows 10,000+ concurrent sessions. We can also get additional gateways and servers if you need them.
Most importantly, we have a 99.5% minimum uptime. With our solution, you can have peace of mind.
Interested?
Don’t wait! Our experts are ready to give you a one-on-one demo to explain how this solution works.
Simply request a demo by clicking the button below and let us show you how our solution can help you manage your contest and giveaway system more efficiently.
