Running a photo competition is a great way of funding part of the printing costs for your calendar or greeting card production. This is a very simple way to bring in funds. For each entry we recommend charging £0.50 to £1.00 per photo (as some people may want to submit more than one image). This will get your members/supporters interested in the product you are producing and gives them the opportunity to have one of their photo’s featured within the product (you may also find that the winners of the competition will buy several copies to give out as presents for Christmas etc. proud to of had their photo featured).

Themes

Picking a theme is important as you will want to ensure that the end product looks professional and have a consistancy throughout, it is also important that the images are all of the same orientation although we have produced designs that can go from portrait to landscape but we are limited with the designs we can offer for this. The Count the Kicks calendar we printed for 2012 shows this well.

How to gain enteries

This is now very simple with the advent of social media, using facebook and twitter are great ways of communicating the competition without costs of advertising. Keep re-posting about the competition and when you have entries then feature those to, setting up a page on facebook just dedicated to the competition is great way of getting your supporters to add comments, photos, share and generally raise awareness of your charity or group. Facebook and Twitter will downsize the images so you will need the winning photos to be e-mailed over once the competition is finished.

Image quality

When setting up the competition it is always wise to add some rules. Firstly to produce a great end product photos taken using a mobile phone will not produce great results so we would recommend that you put these rules within.

1. No mobile phone based images
2. Min file size of 1mb
3. Images should be of a Landscape/Portrait orientation
4. No dates stamps

Finally

Once you have your winning entries then just get in touch with us and we will advise of the best way to send them over, usually e-mail is fine but if your images are really big then there are other ways which maybe easier.