In this guide, we’ll walk you through how you can easily create and run your own online photo contest with Qualifio.
Why you should run a photo contest
Running a photo 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 contest: a step-by-step guide
In this guide, we'll cover:
- Configuring your upload campaign to collect submissions
- Showcasing photos in a gallery and inviting users to vote
- Moderating your contest while participants submit their photos
- Choosing the winner with judging, voting or random drawing
Step 1. Set up your photo upload campaign
You can use our upload campaign types to let users submit photos, videos or texts to enter your contest. Visit this guide for a step-by-step through setting up a photo upload campaign with Qualifio.
Step 2. Set up your photo voting campaign
To create a new photo 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.
If not done in your upload campaign, you can then decide on things like
- the voting system,
- how the gallery will look,
- if vote counts should be public,
- how you want to sort your gallery,
- if you want to limit voter participation. Check our participation limitations to prevent multiple votes and mitigate fraud by using options like one vote per IP or email address.
In the Votes step, select the campaign that your photos have been (or will be) uploaded to. This will automatically create a gallery with thumbnails configured to expand into a “zoom” preview, showing a single image view.
Activate a voting system
By default, photo voting campaigns come with the voting system disabled. Your participants can look at pictures, but you decide whether to enable the vote function in your photo contest.
To allow voting in your gallery, all you need to do is click to select a voting type. Besides the simple voting, you can also choose other voting types like top/flop voting or a star rating on a configurable scale. You will find this setting in step Votes > Voting type:
Gallery view options
In this section, you will find the following options:
- Slideshow only. Activate this setting if you want to create a gallery without thumbnails and only with a slideshow of the photos (zoom preview).
- Display the participant’s name in the gallery. This option allows you to choose how you want participants’ names to be displayed in the gallery.
- Gallery type. Our presentation formats allow you to create a professional-looking gallery to showcase your photo contest submissions.
- Thumbnails per page. This option allows you to set up the number of pictures displayed per page within the gallery.
- Show vote counts. This option allows you to decide if you want to publicly display the vote counts.
- Search option. The search option helps voters find their favourite submissions quickly.
- Default photo order. This option allows you to set up how you want to keep photos organised in the gallery:
- most recent first
- oldest first
- randomly
- most voted first
- least voted first
Add sharing options
By enabling sharing, participants will be able to share individual gallery items through an array of platforms. They will simply have to click on the corresponding share icon at the bottom of each item (zoom preview).
Step 3. Publishing your photo contest
Once you created the gallery with Qualifio, you can embed it on a page on your website or on your Facebook page, or you can use our dedicated minisites. In case you created both an upload and a voting campaign, you should publish the latter.
Check out an embedded photo contest
Allowing upload campaign access from your gallery
Once the upload campaign and the gallery are linked, you can show a button that allows users to access the upload from your gallery – 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. You can also analyse your data directly in Google Analytics to add more dimensions to your participation statistics.
Explanation of the export
To export the files only, do the following:
- Select the upload campaign from the Campaigns tab in Qualifio.
- Click the Statistics button on the right of the campaign title.
- Select Detailed report from the dialog box.
- In the Participations section, click Download all.
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.
- Image sizing: You will get each image 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 gets its own unique URL.
Decide how to pick your winner
Once your photo contest has wrapped up you can pick a winner. There are three ways to identify a winner for your photo 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 photo 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.