On site competitions

Would like to hear from people who have run them.

[trillianjedi]

We have a site about widgets and recently a couple of manufacturers donated to us some of their widget products (good stuff too - high value goods and one of them is the highest top of the range widget available) to give away.

We're thinking of running a competition which members submit to and we'll maybe turn it into a questionnaire or something to get some market research out of it.

Any of you done this before?

If you were running a questionnaire, what sort of questions would you ask your members about your site. Ease of navigation, what features they use, how regularly they visit etc. Anything not so obvious which you think might provide useful info?

I'd also especially like to know how you stop people joining under multiple names in order to enter the competition twice to improve their chances of winnning. We've already taken a couple of steps to doing this, but always interested in other ideas for things we may have missed.

Thanks,

TJ

[GaryK]

I'd also especially like to know how you stop people joining under multiple names in order to enter the competition twice to improve their chances of winning.

IMO, the first step is dealing with your membership database to try and prevent, or at least catch people who sign up more than once. IP Address, rDNS, e-mail, screen name and real name checks, in combination as the member is joining can help prevent duplicate sign-ups. You do have to take special steps when dealing with AOL and others where shared IP Addresses are common. Typically what I do is disallow new members from the same IP Address at services like AOL within 20 minutes of each other. It's not foolproof but it helps.

When it comes to the survey itself, perhaps use a text file to hold the member id of members who have voted already. Disallow voting if their member id is already in the list.

Although not a survey, per se, I've found a forum dedicated to the solicitation of suggestions from members has been invaluable. I've made navigation changes, added/removed features, and doubled my daily visitor count in the last few months alone as a result of implementing many of the member's suggestions.

Perhaps the "rewards" in your case can go to the member(s) who make the best suggestion(s) in the above mentioned forum.

[trillianjedi]

Thanks Gary.

We have a database field in the membership DB to store whether or not a member has "voted", so that aspect has been covered.

I think it may be a bit tricky to start IP address or domain logging for membership due to the size of the membership database, but I'll look into that. Thanks for the suggestion.

We could start a new forum for this, but we wanted to create a survey that we would also release the data from to the widget manufacturers as I think we could provide them invaluable info for future widget development. And it enables our users to have their say in the next generation of widgets. Good for everybody.

So we have a set series of statistical questions for the questionnaire prepared by a market research guy of one of the manufacturers. The web questions are in our court and we will add these to the end of the survey. The survey is completely anonymous. We have email addresses for the members anyway, but won't be releasing them to anyone although I'm sure the manufacturers would love to get their hands on them!

It's not a bad idea to have a blank box for user suggestions rather than just the multi-choice answers though, and give the widget prizes out to the top 5 best answers or something. That would also go some way to preventing double memberships I think.

Thanks,

TJ

<Added>Just a thought - I'd have to read all of them! Maybe not so practical without some help</Added>