Create a Multi-Stage Sweepstakes

In Cool Tabs we consider that a sweepstakes or promo must serve, among other things, to increase the scope and the engagement with your Facebook page. In most sweepstakes, users participate once and then wait for the final raffle or verdict. In some dynamics there is more interaction, since participants try to get votes from their friends, points for their viral actions or recruit other friends to participate. However, there’s just one moment of engagement and everything else depends on the reaction of participants’ friends. That is why we created a new option: The multi-stage sweepstakes.

How does a multi-stage sweepstakes work?

• Participants access the sweepstakes every day, week, or as often as you want them to, and must either answer one or several questions every time, or upload a photo / video / text per stage.
• Participants just have to enter their personal details the first time they access the sweepstakes, these fields will be already completed at all other times.
• Users may only edit the part of the entry corresponding to that specific stage, they won’t be able to touch anything from a prior or later period.
  
  

What type of sweepstakes is this used for?

Quizzes

It is typically used to launch questions that involve users seeing a video in order to reply, choosing between a series of photos, selecting several answers that they consider true or representative of their preferences, or simply replying to a question. Every question and answer may have a different format and you can choose between all the options offered in our quiz and that you can customize in the ‘Customized questions to include in quizzes‘ section of your app.

Example: A sweepstakes where participants fill out their brackets weekly before the next week’s game. You get to pick the format of the question and answer: you can give participants the option to choose between several teams, make them write the winner in their brackets, etc.

Photo Sweepstakes

You can request participants to submit one photo a day or a week, for example trying a product, visiting one of your stores, or with any condition that you think will be fun and useful for users to upload pics periodically.

Example: A contest where participants must upload one photo a day of their outfit or food, or one where they take weekly pictures of an experiment they’re doing. The idea of this sweepstakes is for users to have fun taking pictures and to make it easy for them.

Video Sweepstakes

Just as for pictures, but with videos. This modality tends to be more complicated for participants, so you can ask for simple videos where participants are not present and you just see their hands, or objects or places. The idea is to gather footage from several days to present the participants’ progress.

Example: A cooking contest where users must record 15 minutes of image showing the making a recipe; or a contest with the videos of the daily or weekly training of the most athletic users.

Narrative Sweepstakes

Creating multi-stage narrative sweepstakes is not a very common option, but that’s why it’s a different alternative to what we are used to. It may consist on completing different literary texts, writing mini-stories about several proposed subjects, or asking for different recipes.

Example: A story-writing contest where the story must unravel in installments during 7 days, in such a way that only a limited number of characters can be completed every day.

How do you create a multi-stage sweepstakes?

If you want your sweepstakes to be divided into different stages, just follow the next steps:

1. In the setup form in your Cool Tabs sweepstakes, within the ‘Participation dates and configuration‘ section, you’ll see that there is the option to ‘Choose how many times can a user join the contest’. There, you’ll have to select ‘Each user can join once or more times during the period of time you define‘.

2. That will show two scroll-down fields where you must enter the number of hours of every participation stage (for instance, 24 for 24 hours, 168 for one week, etc.) and the number of times that one can participate in every stage.

3. If it is a quiz, you may indicate the questions that will appear in every stage in the ‘Customized questions to include in quizzes‘ section. To do it, you just have to setup the dates of every question that you include by activating the ‘Display this question in the participation form only between some dates‘ field.

And that’s all. In a few minutes you will be able to have your multi-stage sweepstakes all setup. However, if you still have any doubt about this dynamic, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Create your multi-stage sweepstake with Cool Tabs >>