Case Study - Pandora Poster Contest

The Challenge
In support of GlobalGiving, an organization designed to connect donors to charitable projects, Pandora, the leading online radio service based on the Music Genome Project, wanted to have its users create a poster about the theme of music and charity. The limited edition posters would be used to spread the word of GlobalGiving and as a thank you to donors. The challenge was figuring out how to best collect all the entries and choose the winning poster in a way the involved the Pandora community.

Our Solution
Pandora turned to Votigo, an online platform specializing in user-generated contests, promotions and branded social networks for help. Working together, Pandora and Votigo developed an online contest that allowed users to submit their posters for display on the Votigo.com website, having the community vote to choose the winning entry. To meet Pandora's goal of receiving a high number of superior quality entries, Votigo helped construct a set of contest guidelines for users and recommended that users be able to submit multiple entries.

To ensure a successful and positive campaign using user-generated content it's important to offer users the freedom to express themselves while maintaining the integrity of the brand. To achieve this balance several key features of Votigo's social media platform were used. Pandora leveraged Votigo's administration tools that include client email notification of all new entries in a contest and the ability to easily remove entries that don't meet the contest guidelines. In addition, a two-round contest structure was employed to ensure only the highest rated and highest quality entries were eligible to win the contest.

Votigo implemented the complete end-to-end contest using its premium contest platform running on the Votigo.com community site. Pandora selected a co-branded solution that included a custom landing page, custom contest pages, custom profile, embeddable contest and voting widgets, commenting, photo upload, friend invite tools, fraud-free voting, featured placements on Votigo.com, customized entry and voting periods, and analytic data on the contest and consumer engagement.

Results
The contest was a huge success, far exceeding Pandora's expectations. There were over 750 entries, 428,000 votes and 400,000 views of the contest.