You can boost the entertainment and excitement quotient of your event by adding a voting contest. Guests use their smartphones to vote for their favorite performance, dessert, costume--you name it--directly on your site. Typically each vote costs a small amount, but you can charge $0 per vote if you wish. Vote purchases are added to guest carts and paid for at checkout.
Best Practices and Tips
Use the pre-programmed Voting Contest templates on your site for a headstart on setting up a Dessert Dash or a Talent Contest.
Assess the connectivity at your event venue well in advance of your event to make sure it can sustain mobile voting for the number of guests you anticipate.
Set up bulk priced votes to give your guests a discount for casting multiple votes. For instance if 1 vote costs $5, offer a 5 votes for $20 option, or a 3 votes for $10 option. When setting your price per vote, consider your demographic. Set a price that allows everyone to participate. Encouraging people to vote multiple times keeps everyone competing right up to the end of your contest, so price votes accordingly.
Make voting access easy for your guests by sending them an invitation to vote just before your contest opens.
Set up a Voting Display screen so that your guests can watch the vote tallies rise. The display is programmed to show voting progress in real time, allowing your guests to cheer on their favorite contestants and choose how to cast their next vote(s).
Things to Avoid or Consider
Votes are purchased for specific contestants, which means bulk-priced votes (5 votes for $20, for example) cannot be distributed among multiple contestants.
Do not ask your guests to purchase votes in advance of your contest. Purchasing a vote equals casting a vote. Keep your contest exciting by having people purchase/vote in the moment at your event.
For a more engaging contest, limit the number of contestants. Depending on the number of voters in the room (and bearing in mind that couples may opt to vote as a single entity), 3-5 contestants is usually plenty. Otherwise you risk dispersing votes among too many contenders. (For dessert dashes, offer a number of desserts equal to or slightly less than the number of tables at your venue.)
You have the ability to set an automatic closing time for your contest, or, you can close it manually. If your event typically runs long, or you’re not certain what the program will include, it’s best to opt for closing your contest manually. That way, voting won’t be unexpectedly halted midstream.
While you could theoretically allow people to vote from home, It's not a good idea. First, for a virtual livestream or fusion event, your at-home votes will be hindered by latency, and the votes they cast toward the end of your contest are unlikely to count. Second, your voting display screen can’t be displayed for at-home voters (and, even if it could, by the time they saw it, it would no longer be accurate due to the latency issue). Which means your at-home voters are likely to find the whole mobile voting experience frustrating and confusing, rather than entertaining. If you want to include a contest in a virtual livestream event, you can use the cash donation feature to set up a vote-by-donation contest, rather than using the built-in voting contest feature.
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