INTRODUCTION
Lately I decided to run my very first sponsored contest and I organized one on behalf of Cotton Coin Industry (https://www.cottonco.in). The results of it has impressed me as not only were there many of you who had entered but also many of the submissions were of a great content and quality.
Please allow me to say "Thank you" for your time, effort and support to each one of the participants.
| Organizing this contest has been an amazing experience so far. From the very beginning my main goal was to find a way to build engagement between myself and the Steemit community related to crypto and blockchain. And as I mentioned above, the results turned out to be amazing! :) |  (pic source: www.thompsoncoburn.com) |
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JUDGES
Initially my target was to receive no more than 30 entries (I assumed minimum 15-20) but at the end of the contest there were around 60 writers who created their reviews and picking the 10 best entries was almost an impossible task for just one person (me).
I realized at this very moment that I needed some “requirement” to help me with this mountain of a task. With the support from Cotton Coin Technology I've managed to get over 20 judges on board who's initial task was simple: to help me to pick 10 best entries.
| Each of those judges will be rewarded with an extra COTN coin for their support. This is Cotton Coin’s little contribution. Im glad that the Cotton On team is aware of the importance of giving back to the community. COTTON COIN themselves wants to reward those who are showing that little extra engagement. After all it's important to build trust in the blockchain community. |  (source: https://www.cottonco.in) |
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Cotton Coin Contest judges:
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 | @Maxiemoses-eu |  |  |
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Thank you to all of you!
Important: I will personally make sure that all judges will be rewarded with 30 COTN (current market value around 50usd) once this contest will be completely over (second half of month of July)
THAT'S WHEN I FACED SERIOUS PROBLEM
I knew that my budget was too small to reward all authors but I didn't want to reward only 10 people out of 60. I was fully aware that I could lose many of those authors who might ignore my next contest seeing that the reward pool is quite small and competition fierce.
I knew by that time that if I don’t come up with a solution that would please most authors then I won't ever see many of them again. And I really didn't want that to happen. I invested an enormous amount of time to build connections with many valuable people here on Steemit and I needed to find a way to maintain this healthy relationship.
| My thoughts were simple. I asked myself a question: why are most people here on Steemit? Two main reasons: rewards and engagement. If one cannot find a way to make a decent profit on Steemit and on top of that his/her's posts are not attracting any attention, most likely sooner or later such a person will abandon Steemit. |  (pic source: my own image lol) |
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I've seen it happening so many times before.
MY LITTLE SOCIAL EXPERIMENT
I knew that I needed to find a way to provide authors with either more rewards or at least to ensure that their posts will be noticed by other community members. After all, most of us would stay and keep blogging if we have some audience, who is actually reading our posts. We all need to know that our work has purpose.
I figured that I may try something else. Something no one else did on Steemit before (or at least to my knowledge).
| I've asked all judges to make sure that they will leave some valuable comment on each of the 10 selected entries. To show their support to all chosen best authors. I also asked if they could leave any comment whenever they notice that someone did their best but it's still not good enough and such a person has no comments at all. |  *(pic source: djbooth.net) |
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Our main goal was not to create competitive environment but instead, to increase supportive engagement within our small crypto community. And it turned out to be a BLAST!
POSITIVE FEEDBACKS
I've received a few inspiring feedback from some of you. Let me quote one of my favourites one:
"I loved your contest and I found it a great idea to recrute people from the community to use as judges. They become directly ambassadors of the project and you can even spread the word better like that! In addition to that the people who took part in the contest got a lot of feed-backs to their articles. I've never recieved so many comments of people who really read my article! You got a very good concept there."
Thanks to the engagement shown by our team of judges, some posts received way more comments than they ever do. I strongly believe it will encourage many of them to keep being active on Steemit. OUR JOB IS DONE! :)
Perfect example: picture on the right handside.
WHAT'S NEXT? Contest winners announcement: 14/07/2018
I would love to be able to organize one contest every month. Either sponsored or more general about blockchain and crypto. If anyone would like to be a judge or participate in next contests then please drop me a message to my public email (krypto.piotr77@gmail.com). I will definitely do my best to keep in touch and reply to all messages.
I still have one week to read through all the entries myself and on 14/07/2018 (saturday) I will announce the list of 10 winners.
Thank you everyone,
Yours,
Piotr