House File Building Campaign

Amanda Langford

We are going to launch a housefile building campaign next month.  Since the Go! team did most of the work on the last one, I'm a little unclear as to how to select a winner in the drawing.  As I recall, the drawing had several ways of entering including:

• completing a drawing entry - 1 entry
• sending an eCard to friends - 5 eCards = 1 entry
• making a donation - $1 = 1 entry

Does anyone remember the basic steps to setting up this drawing and how the winner is chosen?

Adam Lemmon

Hi Amanda,

You are spot on with your list of ways people entered the contest when we ran the give-away in the Convio Go! program.

The way that we built the list of entrants for the drawing took a little bit of work to create a microsoft excel spreadsheet which had all of the entries listed.

• For the survey they filled out, the way that you can pull these entries yourself, is to run the survey report, download the csv file, and this will give you your first set of entries (everyone listed on that report will have one entry in your new spreadsheet).  I start by putting this list into the new excel spreadsheet and then I create a column next to their name with a number for each row (starting at 1, 2, 3, 4... etc)
  
• * For the eCards you can run the report called "eCard Senders report" (found by navigating to Email --> eCards --> click on the "eCard Reports" tab).  That report will give you a list of everyone who sent an eCard along with the number of eCards that they've sent.  I past this list of people into the new excel spreadsheet and I include a column for the number eCards taht they sent.
  
• * For donations, you can run the donations by transaction report only showing donations for the specific donation form or for the specific timeframe that the contest is active... this report will give you a list of transactions and the amount that they donated.  You can past this into the new excel spreadsheet along with a column for the amount that they've donated.

Once you have created your new spreadsheet and added all of the entries into new rows, the next part is quite tricky -- you need to have some level of familiarty with excel so that you can appropriately changed the number of entries that each person has for their eCard deliveries (5 eCards sent = 1 entry) --- you will need to use standard excel formulas to populate the entry column with the proper number of entries, AND THEN once that's done, you will then be able to create a final column which has the running total of number of entries available for you right next to the name of the entrant.

After that's done, you can then choose a random number (a variety of ways to do this) and once you have the random number you can find where that entrant falls on the list of entrants.

* For both the eCard calculation and the dollars donated calculation, we formerly used a Convio product called "Rewards" to track the total number of eCards sent and the dollars donated -- unfortunately, because of some limitations in the Rewards product, the Convio Go! program has ceased to use Rewards for give-away contest participation tracking.  This is also part of the reason that the Convio Go! program no longer uses the dollars donated as a way to enter into the give-away contests that we run.  We currently only calculate entries based off of survey participation and by number of eCards delivered.

Please update this post if you have further questions about how we run these give-away contest drawings in the Convio Go! program.

Adam

Merrell McGinness

Adam Lemmon:

Hi Amanda,

You are spot on with your list of ways people entered the contest when we ran the give-away in the Convio Go! program.

The way that we built the list of entrants for the drawing took a little bit of work to create a microsoft excel spreadsheet which had all of the entries listed.

• For the survey they filled out, the way that you can pull these entries yourself, is to run the survey report, download the csv file, and this will give you your first set of entries (everyone listed on that report will have one entry in your new spreadsheet).  I start by putting this list into the new excel spreadsheet and then I create a column next to their name with a number for each row (starting at 1, 2, 3, 4... etc)
  
• * For the eCards you can run the report called "eCard Senders report" (found by navigating to Email --> eCards --> click on the "eCard Reports" tab).  That report will give you a list of everyone who sent an eCard along with the number of eCards that they've sent.  I past this list of people into the new excel spreadsheet and I include a column for the number eCards taht they sent.
  
• * For donations, you can run the donations by transaction report only showing donations for the specific donation form or for the specific timeframe that the contest is active... this report will give you a list of transactions and the amount that they donated.  You can past this into the new excel spreadsheet along with a column for the amount that they've donated.

Once you have created your new spreadsheet and added all of the entries into new rows, the next part is quite tricky -- you need to have some level of familiarty with excel so that you can appropriately changed the number of entries that each person has for their eCard deliveries (5 eCards sent = 1 entry) --- you will need to use standard excel formulas to populate the entry column with the proper number of entries, AND THEN once that's done, you will then be able to create a final column which has the running total of number of entries available for you right next to the name of the entrant.

After that's done, you can then choose a random number (a variety of ways to do this) and once you have the random number you can find where that entrant falls on the list of entrants.

* For both the eCard calculation and the dollars donated calculation, we formerly used a Convio product called "Rewards" to track the total number of eCards sent and the dollars donated -- unfortunately, because of some limitations in the Rewards product, the Convio Go! program has ceased to use Rewards for give-away contest participation tracking.  This is also part of the reason that the Convio Go! program no longer uses the dollars donated as a way to enter into the give-away contests that we run.  We currently only calculate entries based off of survey participation and by number of eCards delivered.

Please update this post if you have further questions about how we run these give-away contest drawings in the Convio Go! program.

Adam

Hi Adam,

Thanks for the response...I'm not sure I'm totally clear.  If I understand you correctly, you assign each entry a number next to their name, then pick a random number and whoever's name is next to that number wins.  We're doing 1 additional entry for 1 eCard sent.  So if someone sent 10 eCards, it seems like you'd need them to have their name on 10 individual rows so that they'd have 10 "entries".  Is that correct?  It seemed like from reading your explanation that each eCard sender has one row with a column that shows number of eCards sent.  Can you clarify?

Adam Lemmon

Merrell McGinness:

Hi Adam,

Thanks for the response...I'm not sure I'm totally clear.  If I understand you correctly, you assign each entry a number next to their name, then pick a random number and whoever's name is next to that number wins.  We're doing 1 additional entry for 1 eCard sent.  So if someone sent 10 eCards, it seems like you'd need them to have their name on 10 individual rows so that they'd have 10 "entries".  Is that correct?  It seemed like from reading your explanation that each eCard sender has one row with a column that shows number of eCards sent.  Can you clarify?

So what you'll need to do (or again -- as part of the Go! program this is something that we'll be doing for you) is to create a column in the spreadsheet which uses a standard Excel formula to add the number of entries on the previous row to include the number of entries for that participant.

For example:

Name of entrantNumber of entries for each participantTotal number of entriesJohn Smith11Jane Smith56Jolly Smith1016Jake Smith319Jack Smith625James Smith227Jimmy Smith128Jerry Smith1038Janice Smith1553Jose Smith356etc...etcetc

What would happen in the above scenario if you the random number chosen was - Let's say 42... the 42nd entry belongs to Janice Smith.  The final column on the right is a total running tally of the entries in the contest.  You can see that Janice Smith sent 15 ecards so she has 15 entries that fall between 38 and 53.

Again, we'll organize the drawing for you as part of the Go! program, so you won't need to stress out too much for this first one Merrell.  :-)  We'll also make sure to send you the entry list after the drawing so that you can see that all of the entries are listed in the drawing sheet that we use for your drawing.  Sound good?

Adam

Amanda Langford

Adam Lemmon:

So what you'll need to do (or again -- as part of the Go! program this is something that we'll be doing for you) is to create a column in the spreadsheet which uses a standard Excel formula to add the number of entries on the previous row to include the number of entries for that participant.

For example:

Name of entrantNumber of entries for each participantTotal number of entriesJohn Smith11Jane Smith56Jolly Smith1016Jake Smith319Jack Smith625James Smith227Jimmy Smith128Jerry Smith1038Janice Smith1553Jose Smith356etc...etcetc

What would happen in the above scenario if you the random number chosen was - Let's say 42... the 42nd entry belongs to Janice Smith.  The final column on the right is a total running tally of the entries in the contest.  You can see that Janice Smith sent 15 ecards so she has 15 entries that fall between 38 and 53.

Again, we'll organize the drawing for you as part of the Go! program, so you won't need to stress out too much for this first one Merrell.  :-)  We'll also make sure to send you the entry list after the drawing so that you can see that all of the entries are listed in the drawing sheet that we use for your drawing.  Sound good?

Adam

On the eCard sender report, what is the difference between "Number of cards sent" and "Number of recipients"?

Patrick Hansen

Amanda Langford:

On the eCard sender report, what is the difference between "Number of cards sent" and "Number of recipients"?

Hi Amanda,

The way Convio describes those two metrics can be confusing, so I'm glad you asked.  In a nutshell:

Number of Cards Sent:  This is the number of times a constituent has interacted with the eCard form to send messages

Number of Recipients:  This is the total number of individuals who have received eCards from the constituent in question

So ... if I go to your eCard page and submit the form once to send an eCard to my brother, then return the page to send it again to my mother, then one more time to send it to my wife, I've "sent three Cards" according to Convio and these three cards went to three recipients.  Each time I sent "a card", I could have customized it with a different message for each of the recipients.

If, however, I go to your eCard page and submit the form once and send the exact same message to three people at once (again, maybe, my brother, my mother and my wife), I've sent one eCard and there were three recipients.

Make sense?

-patrick

Amanda Langford

Yes makes perfect sense - thanks!