I would like to have a contest on my forum in the near future and offer some sort of prize like a gift card maybe? I was wondering if anyone has done this and if so what have you given away? I find it a little bit difficult trying to avoid mailing anything to the winner....

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In my own experience contests have not gone over very well for me. Unless you have very nice prizes, something that your userbase will be very interested in, people are just too lazy to participate. I held a contest this past spring and I had over $700 in combined prizes for the top 5 entries, and I only had 1 entry at all. And the prizes were things (I thought at least) would be of interest to my forum. I'm sure other people have had a lot of success with contests, that is just my own experience.

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wow! $700! next time you have a contest like that let me know! lol

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http://www.dontbeangry.com

Well the prizes were 3 WoW guides each around $35-40, 2 months of WoW gametime ($15/month), and a WoW t-shirt from jinx.com. So I thought they were pretty good, but would only be of interest to someone who plays WoW.

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yea it just depends. I find that contests don't bring new members they keep current members who are already active on longer.

On Abadss, the people there love to be on the site and love to chat with the people. They don't need to be there everyday because they don't always need support for their receiver, but they love to be on the site. for many of them its the first site they joined and the reason they got on the internets. Anywho, we do contests and stuff like that all the time and generally it goes over really well because it gives them a reason to be on and something to do. It really depends on the dynamics of your forum though. People on here, i don't think would want to participate that much in a contest because they own forums and are busy all the time so its not that big of an incentive. Really it is a lot of trial and error.

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I agree with what has been said. It really depends on what your members want. I guess if you do decide to hold a contest, then yes the prizes must be something to do with your forum. Obviously money is preferred by most people. It depends if you can put into the contest and what the contest is about. The contest must be something the users will be able to do. The most common are the post contests e.g. 'Most posts in the month xx'.

Can someone suggest some non CASH Prizes for CONTESTS to attract members ???

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