Wacom saw the success of the Power of the Pens campaign and decided to build on the momentum that it created. Instead of one contest that covers the entire campaign period, Wacom decided to split the campaign period into 12 one-month-long contests. Instead of publishing all the artwork from the selected Pen Scrappers all at once, Wacom decided to release work from a different Pen Scrapper every month. The results? In the first five months of the Pen Scrappers campaign, over 1,000 entries have been submitted generating over 10,000 votes. A considerable improvement achieved simply by splitting the contests into smaller periods (and thus, increasing return visits and site replay value).
The Pen Scrappers is built in WordPress. The TDO Mini Forms plugin was used to allow users to submit entries without the need for a WordPress login. This plugin was further hacked to save uploaded entries to Amazon’s EC2 cloud service in order to place as little server load on the penscrappers.com server as possible. Voting is done by a jQuery AJAX script that I used to interface with a database table that kept track of votes for each entry.
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