Using Khoros Contests

[AlanA]

Hey everyone, 

I'm curious if anyone has had success with the 'Khoros Contests' feature. This is included in our subscription but has yet to be used. Can anyone provide any examples of how other customers have used it in the wild?

Happy Holidays! 

[JasonHill]

Hi @AlanA,

When we launched our community we thought we would be clever and repurpose the Contests module as a project gallery to encourage people to share photos of their completed projects. It worked well to encourage photo sharing a create a place that was easy to contribute to and easy to browse. The downside was that members were confused whether to share their project on the gallery, the discussion boards, or both. So we ended up retiring it. 

More recently we ran a competition to find Australia's best D.I.Y. projects. Rather than use the Contests module which only allows people to share one photo and no text, we just added a new label and any posts with that label appeared on our competition gallery. 

Hope that helps. In summary, the Contests module could be fine for a very specific use but there are other ways to encourage photo sharing and run community competitions. 

Jason

[CarolineS]

Great question, @AlanA.

We run a lot of contests but don't use the Contests module for them. Rather, our contests are announced in blog posts and people submit their entries as comments on the blog post. Here's an example contest: https://community.meraki.com/t5/Community-Announcements/CONTEST-CLOSED-Reduce-Reuse-Recycle-a-Gently... In the past we have had people vote for their favorite entries via kudos on the comments, but typically we didn't get a ton of votes so we have generally moved to a random draw of a few entries as winners or enlisting some internal experts to judge the entries (depending on the type of contest). If we need entries to be secret for whatever reason (e.g. there's only one correct answer) we turn on blog comment moderation temporarily.

Funny, like @JasonHill we also repurposed the official "contest" module to be a project gallery. Perhaps I got the idea from him; I forget! You can see our project gallery here: https://community.meraki.com/t5/Meraki-Projects-Gallery/con-p/projects - really the only reason to use Contests for this (vs just a normal forum) is that you can rename things like "Post a thread" to "Create a project".

Another example of Contests in the wild is actually here on Atlas - they use Contests for the annual Khoros Kudos awards: https://community.khoros.com/t5/Kudos-Awards-2022/con-p/kudosawards2022

Hope that helps; curious to learn how others are using Contests!

[LarryI]

Excellent examples of contests!  Selfishly, I'm saving this for when we look at Contests for Aurora.  There are some concepts like the "time based submissions" or "secret entries" that I like for Contests AND the Ideas discussion style.  More to come on those next year!

With the current iteration of Contests, I'd like to see more usage of the text-based style of contests.  We do that for Khoros Kudos as @CarolineS said, and I feel it's a great way to collect case studies from customers or to challenge your users to think outside of the box on certain solutions.

How you tie that into ranks, badges, or other gamification elements is another interesting topic of discussion.  After all, when you win a contest, it's cool to share that on your profile visually in some way via a rank, badge or a special avatar.

In gaming communities, I can see video based contests being used to great effect.  Even B2B communities, where you share tips and tricks and people vote on the best one.

I'm glad this is being discussed at this point in time.  Later in 2023, I'd love to explore more opportunities with the Contests discussion style with everyone here, especially in terms of making it more accessible / configurable to meet your needs.