One of the most common ways to select winners or finalists is through online voting. This approach increases the visibility of the event while allowing the audience to participate in the decision-making process. However, organizing a successful online voting contest comes with challenges, from managing categories and voting rules to preventing fraud and ensuring fair results.
At Easypromos, we have spent more than 15 years helping brands and organizations run online voting contests. We know that voting campaigns can significantly increase visibility and engagement, but they also require the right tools to maintain trust, transparency, and credibility.
In this article, we share the key elements to consider when organizing an online voting contest, along with practical examples and recommendations based on real campaigns.
7 Keys to Choose an Award Show Voting Tool
Don’t start planning your award voting without reading these tips. They will help you determine which tool you need and how to approach the campaign.
Key 1: Provide Each Candidate With a Unique Link to Share and Gather Votes
A unique link for each candidate helps promote their entry and maximizes the contest’s visibility. To maximize participation, each candidate should have their own unique link and be able to access and share it easily. Supporters should also be able to share the candidate’s link with minimal effort. Additionally, their supporters should also be able to share this link effortlessly.
It’s crucial that shared content be engaging. Most social networks, like Facebook, Instagram, or X, as well as messaging apps like WhatsApp or Telegram, display a preview of the link. This preview should include key information about the candidate, such as the photo or video to vote for, along with basic information. This encourages supporters to click through, view the candidate’s entry, and cast their vote.
The organizer should also have tools to distribute unique links automatically and trigger follow-up actions, such as encouraging voters to share the candidate they supported. This helps generate the viral reach that every contest organizer is looking for.
Explore our photo contest voting demo to see how candidates can share their entries and gather votes.
Key 2: Require Voters to Register Before Voting
While anonymous voting may seem appealing, it is not a realistic option for serious online awards. One of the biggest challenges in any online voting contest is preventing fraud. The first line of defense is to identify voters through a registration process.
Registration can be as simple as asking for a name, email address, and acceptance of the privacy policy. Depending on your needs, you can also request additional information such as a phone number or age. Social login options like Google or Facebook can help simplify the process.
It can also be useful to reward participation, for example by running a prize drawing among everyone who registers and votes.
Having the voter’s email address and consent also makes it possible to send an automated follow-up email. This message can thank them for participating, remind them of the candidate they voted for, and encourage them to share the candidate’s unique link with others, creating the viral effect that helps award voting campaigns gain visibility.
Key 3: Fraud control is a must in an award show voting tool
Fraud control is the most important aspect of any online voting contest. When valuable prizes are involved, some participants may attempt to manipulate the results through practices that would be difficult or impossible in an offline environment. Vote-buying websites, vote-exchange forums, fake email accounts, and bots are just some of the challenges that organizers may face.
Fortunately, there are effective ways to combat fraud. This is one of the main reasons why voter registration is so important. It allows organizers to apply anti-fraud measures such as email verification, blocking temporary email addresses, detecting suspicious IP activity, limiting voting frequency per device, and identifying patterns associated with vote buying or vote exchanges.
A voting system should also include monitoring tools and alerts that help organizers detect suspicious activity during the voting period. In addition, it is advisable to include a clause in the contest rules that allows the organizer to remove fraudulent votes or disqualify candidates if necessary.
Key 4: Hide vote counters and rankings in your online award show voting
An effective technique to minimize fraud is to hide the vote counter or ranking. If candidates cannot compare themselves to others, they won’t know how many votes they need to gain an advantage, which reduces the temptation to engage in fraudulent practices. A good approach is to keep the vote counters visible during most of the voting period and hide them during the final days.
Another option to minimize fraud is not to select the final winner through popular vote, but rather to have the popular votes determine the top three finalists, with a jury selecting the winner.
The Advanced Votes feature goes beyond a traditional single-vote system. Participants can select multiple candidates and assign a different score to each one. This is ideal for rankings, favorite-voting campaigns, or award contests where voters are asked to rank their preferences rather than choose a single winner.
Key 5: Enabling daily voting frequency securely is key
Allowing users to vote once a day is an effective strategy for increasing visibility. This daily voting frequency encourages users to return to the contest, generating more visits, more shared links, and ultimately more visibility.
Key 6: Categories and stages system
Many award show voting contests include multiple categories or stages, helping extend the event over time and increase its visibility. Categories also allow for multiple winners. It is essential that each category can be managed independently to simplify administration. Each category should have its own start and end dates, voting system, and ranking. The platform should also make it easy to manage different stages and display previous results, such as in contests with semifinal and final rounds.
A great example is a television contest where viewers vote for the most beautiful town in the region. The region is divided into provinces, and users vote weekly for the towns in their area, eventually selecting the best town from each province and, ultimately, the prettiest town in the entire region.
Key 7: Voting tool must showcase all the strengths of the candidates
In an awards contest, it’s crucial for candidates to present themselves in the best possible way. As the organizer, you should provide all the tools needed to showcase each entry. Entries should be able to include videos, photos, documents, social media links, and any other content that helps highlight the candidate’s strengths.
Main objectives of your award show voting action
Before creating your voting system, clearly define the objectives of your campaign:
- Increase brand visibility and recognition by organizing an awards competition as a PR initiative to capture media attention
- Collaborate with sponsors to reach a broader audience
- Strengthen brand values by rewarding members of an online community, company employees, or even students
- Generate new leads and collect valuable data by hosting a voting contest on a topic that interests your target audience
Real Examples of Award Show Voting Campaigns
Once you have a clear objective for your campaign, you can easily configure the right voting mechanics in Easypromos. Let’s look at some real examples of how these voting systems have been used.
Choosing the right application for your online awards is key to success. The best option depends on the type of contest you want to run and the experience you want to create for participants:
- You already know the nominees – if you already have the list of potential winners, then all you need is a voting application. You can use the Easypromos Online Voting Contest to showcase all candidates and ask your community to vote for their favorite nominee. Public Lands Alliance invited their audience to choose the best innovative product, publication, or public engagement program.
After entering the voting page, participants could browse all nominees and vote for their favorite.
- You want the public to nominate their colleagues – if you’re still looking for potential winners, ask your social media followers to nominate family members, friends, coworkers, neighbors, or even themselves. Invite them to submit their nominations through an Easypromos Photo Contest. Once you have a list of nominees, run it by the public and let them choose the winner of your online awards.
Here’s an example of the 2024 Romanian Visual Awards. The competition rewards the best Romanian photographers in a variety of categories like landscape, wildlife, analog, etc. The ease of participation helped make the contest a success, with more than 1,300 participants and over 1,500 submitted projects.
Did you know that Easypromos includes an advanced fraud control system designed specifically for voting contests? We developed it to detect suspicious activity and help ensure fair and transparent voting.
Attract candidates and voters with attractive prizes and incentives
As you probably already know, prizes are one of the main motivators for participating in a giveaway or promotion. The same principle applies to online voting campaigns. If you want to reach a broad audience and attract as many candidates and voters as possible, participation incentives can play an important role in the success of your campaign.
But what’s the best prize? It should appeal to your target audience and be relevant to your industry or business. Your own products or discount coupons are often a good option, but tech gadgets and unique experiences are also popular incentives.
Here’s an example from Dos Anclas and their recipe video contest. To encourage voting, they raffled off a bundle of their products among participants.
Online voting to follow up an offline action
Another great example is this action by El Ingenio Shopping Center, which organized a casting to find three families to star in its upcoming fashion campaigns. Participating families had to visit the mall and take a photo at the campaign’s branded photocall. The shopping center then uploaded all the photos to a microsite, allowing the public to vote and choose the winning family. This type of campaign is an excellent way to involve customers in important brand decisions.
Are you ready to launch your own online awards contest? We hope this article has helped clarify the key elements to consider when planning a successful voting campaign.
If you still have questions, feel free to contact us through our live chat. Our team will be happy to help you choose the right voting mechanics and configure your campaign.
