Read the Rules

Hello everyone!  How was your weekend, any nice prizes to report?  Won again on the Bee Happy Game this weekend, and won a sticker book on a twitter comp – another nice Christmas gift to squirrel away.  Feel like I have my comping mojo back now – been spending much more time comping, now the kids are back at school.  My youngest is now officially full time, so have my full 6 hours a day, plus evenings back to work, do housework, do surveys and COMP!  How do you all find the time on a daily basis to fit it all in, I would love to hear all your tips!  I find I do the dailies and instant wins first thing, then I move onto the comps closing today later in the evening, then I do a search for comps I am trying to win – like scooters, London breaks, anything to do with Christmas and Frozen!  I am also trying to save up Amazon vouchers for Christmas, by doing surveys and winning them where I can!  What are you concentrating on at the moment?

I thought, as we were all getting back into our comping swing, it would be a good time to remind people about one of the most important comping habits to learn – read the rules!  It can be very tempting and easy just to plough right through your comps, entering everything and anything, regardless of whether or not you or anyone you know wants or needs the prize. However, there won’t be many of us who have ended up winning prizes that we have no use for, or have been unable to claim for one of many reasons, just because we didn’t read the (often very short and to the point) terms & conditions.  To give you some guidelines, here are some useful tips to make sure you don’t waste your precious comping time:

• Check the closing date – the most basic of all Ts & Cs, if the comp has closed you definitely won’t win!
• Check what the prizes are – If the promoter is giving away a year’s worth of peanuts, and you and your family are all highly allergic, it probably isn’t worth entering it unless you know someone who likes to make their own peanut butter!  Don’t end up with a house full of unwanted prizes, when someone else could make use of them if they won instead.
• Check the venue – If you are entering for concert or event tickets make sure you can get there if you win.  It can be much more disheartening to win and then have to turn down tickets, than not to win them at all because you know in your heart you can’t get there.  I recently won tickets for an intimate gig with James at Absolute Radio, which was to be held in London.  As it was a weekday and around lunchtime I thought I would be able to get there, but it turned out to be a short pre-tour warm up gig, and getting there and home would have taken twice as long as the concert would have lasted.  The promoter chose another winner, but I was sent some nice consolation signed goodies as a runner’s up prize.
• Check the delivery options – Quite a lot of small, local promotions will offer their prizes for local pick up only, make sure you check in the terms.  Quite often though, if you win a local pick up only prize, the promoter may offer to send it to you, if you agreed to pay the postage.  This may not be practical if the prize is worth only a small amount of money, but it is your decision.  Alternatively, maybe someone in a comping group lives locally and wouldn’t mind picking it up and sending it on to you?  Always worth asking.
• Check the entry method – If you are entering over social media, be sure and double check how to enter properly.  If you need to tag in a company, or use specific hashtags in your entry, then make sure you need them.  If the entry says that must like and comment, don’t just like the post, make sure you comment too or it won’t count.
• Check the photo rules – When entering photo entry comps, make sure you read all the rules carefully.  A lot of people missed out in the recent J20 #GoldenHour comp, because they hadn’t read the clause in the terms that stated that all people in their photos must be over 18.  All those entries made using peoples’ children will have been void and had no chance of winning.  Similarly, if a particular product needs to be in the shot, make sure you do include it!
• Check for copywrite issues – If you are entering you most prize photograph of your children, or a family member, would you be happy for the photo to be shared across the whole of social media and beyond?  If the answer is no, then probably don’t use it in a comp.  Generally as a rule, once you enter the photo into a comp, the promoter has the right to use it for their own promotional purposes and to share who the winner was, so bare this in mind when you are sharing photographs.
• Check for voting options – On a few occasions recently I have entered a photo competition on Facebook, only to discover once I had uploaded it that the competition was a voting based one!  I then had to make the decision whether to wholeheartedly get behind this photo, and ask all my friends to vote regularly, or to leave it to the Gods and see what happened.  On most of the occasions I did the latter, and of course I didn’t win.  Voting competitions are a minefield of issues – there are all sorts of ways people can cheat in order to win, and most of the time it really isn’t worth the effort.

So there you have it my top tips on not missing out on prizes, just for the sake of spending a few minutes reading the Terms & Conditions associated with the promotion.

Happy comping everyone, lots of Lucky Dust to you all!

Kirsty x