Create an online photo or video contest (Beta gallery)

In this guide we’ll walk you through how you can easily create and run your own online photo or video contest with Qualifio’s new gallery.

Why you should run a photo or video contest

Running a photo or video contest is an amazing way to engage your customers, boost brand awareness, inspire people with user-generated content and capture valuable user data.

Take a look at this demo we put together:

Create a photo or video contest: a step-by-step guide

In this guide, we’ll cover:

1. Configuring your upload campaign to collect submissions
2. Showcasing photos and videos in a gallery and inviting users to vote
3. Choosing the winner with judging or voting

Step 1. Set up your upload campaign

You can use our upload campaign type to let users submit photos or videos to enter your contest. In this guide, we’ll take you step-by-step through setting up an upload campaign with Qualifio.

Gallery options

In the Settings > Gallery section, once you select the New gallery, you will find the following options:

• Thumbnails. Our presentation formats allow you to create a professional-looking gallery to showcase your contest submissions.
• Columns. This option allows you to set up the number of columns displayed per page within the gallery.
• Thumbnails per page. This option allows you to set up the number of pictures or videos displayed per page within the gallery.
• Search enabled. The search option helps voters find favourite submissions quickly.
• Show sorting option. This option allows you to set up how you want to keep photos or videos organised in the gallery:
  • most recent first (default)
  • oldest first
  • most voted first
  • least voted first

Finally, the following options allow you to choose what information you want to display for each image in the gallery: the title and subtitle (circled in white)...

… and the description (in blue), which will only show in the “zoom preview”.

Note that to display the first or last names of the users, you will need to collect both first and last names in the form.

Step 2. Set up your voting campaign (optional)

To create a new voting campaign, click the Votes campaign type.

You can decide if participants can vote anonymously or if a form or login is required. If you set up identified voting, you’ll be able to collect voter information through a registration form. Note: it is not possible to prefill participant details from the upload form to the voting form.

In the Votes step, select the campaign that your photos or videos have been (or will be) uploaded to. To select an upload campaign, click on the dropdown and you will see a list of all upload campaigns available.

Note: you can’t select an upload campaign with an unconfigured gallery. If you can’t find your campaign in the list, please make sure a gallery was created in the campaign. You’ll see the option to choose between the new and the old gallery in the “Settings” step of your upload campaign.

You can then decide on things like the voting system and if vote counts should be public. You will find these settings in the step Votes > Voting:

By default voting campaigns come with the voting system enabled.

Step 3. Publishing your contest

Once you created the voting campaign with Qualifio, you can embed it in a page on your website or use our dedicated minisites. In case you created both an upload and a voting campaign, you should publish the latter.

Allowing upload campaign access from your vote campaign

Once the upload campaign and the vote campaign are linked, you can show a button that allows users to access the upload from your vote campaign – and the other way around. All you need to do is check the Enable double access option in the Welcome step of your vote campaign.

Step 4. Track or export results and pick winners

You can measure the success and impact of your campaign using the campaign statistics and the Global Stats.

Explanation of the export

To export the images only, do the following:

1. Select the upload campaign from the Campaigns tab in Qualifio.
2. Click the Statistics button on the right of the campaign title.
3. Select Detailed report from the dialog box.
4. In the Participations section, click Download all.

You can also select the file(s) that you want to export. The more data you are exporting, the longer this process can take.
Notes:

• File naming: The file names contain a unique ID. They don’t include the campaign name, date or any other data. There’s currently no option to override this and change the file name.
• File sizing: You will get each image or video in its original size as well as a compressed version.

Lastly, our platform also includes the possibility to export participant data as CSV or Excel for future marketing purposes. In that case, you’ll notice that this works a bit differently as each photo or video gets its own unique URL.

Decide how to pick your winner

Once your contest has wrapped up you can pick a winner. There are three ways to identify a winner for your contest and you should be clear in the contest rules about what that process can entail.

You can

• choose a panel of judges for selecting your contest winners, which can offer more legitimacy and allow you to reward skill or merit,
• allow voters to choose a winner, which is more interactive and fun, but can leave the door open to those who might game the system,
• randomly draw a winner, which is entirely impartial but can be classified as an illegal lottery in some countries (winners are chosen only by the luck of the draw). Learn how to draw winners in this tutorial.