This blog post was co-written by Justin Clark and Annemarie Henning
When beginning an event or campaign, nonprofit organizations often need to create custom artwork. While hiring a professional designer is often the best choice, some organizations create an art contest. It’s an ideal way to engage volunteers, highlight artists in your community, and promote your event/campaign.
Hosting an art contest can be challenging though. Below is a list of things to outline when you’re considering this opportunity.
Define the rules and your needs
One of the first steps to kicking off an art contest is to determine how you’ll use the artwork. Is it needed for printed marketing materials, website promotion, and/or social media? Will you create t-shirts or other promotional items with the design? For the various potential uses, what size artwork will work best? Define a specific size for contest submissions, and know that you may need the winning artwork to be submitted in multiple sizes to fit a few different formats (and specify that in your contest rules).
Is there content that needs to be included in the artwork, such as date, time, location, logos, or theme? You’ll need to decide what you’re looking for (digital artwork, photography, video, etc.), define accepted file formats, and provide file specifications (file size, number of colors, etc.). You don’t want to risk, for example, receiving submissions as Word documents when what you need for reproduction is vector artwork. Or a situation we encountered with a winning design that required more ink colors on the press than we could afford in the budget. All of the potential design needs must be determined and made clear to potential artists.
You’ll also need to define who is eligible to submit artwork. Some organizations that focus on youth services may want to limit entries to young people. We recommend limiting the number of submissions to one or two per artist, as this helps focus the artist and avoid the spamming of entries.
Finally, we recommend that you include something along the lines of, “All artwork must be original – you cannot use third-party artwork or materials in your work – this means that you cannot use anything that was created by someone else (especially if it is trademarked or restricted by the original artist).” This helps protect your organization from copyright issues and allows for your unlimited use down the road.
Determine how you’re going to pick a winner
Before embarking on this process, determine the method you’ll use for choosing a winner. Will one person or a small committee pick the best entry? Will you have a team of volunteers and/or staff vote? However, you choose a winner, communicate this to potential artists at the outset of the campaign. This level of transparency helps protect your organization against participants complaining about the results.
We’ve had success in the past with setting up a vote with staff and volunteers. The artist’s name was removed to avoid conflict of interest in voting. We asked individuals to pick their top three entries and assigned points to each – 5 points for 1st place, 3 points for 2nd place, and 1 point for 3rd place. Allowing individuals to vote for three options provides a broader consensus of choice. Divisive entries that were either voted highly or not at all were at a disadvantage compared to entries that were consistently on all ballots.
If you use a voting system, you have a responsibility for voters to have transparency in the process as well. If your Executive Director or volunteer chair wants to retain the right to refuse a winner, voters should know that. On a prior project, an ED mentioned that if the second-place choice had won, she would have refused it to be allowed. We had been operating as if the voting was democratic. Knowing this in advance, we would have included something in the voting instructions to indicate that “the organization reserves the right to choose the next highest voted entry if there is an issue with getting the rights to use the artwork or the design of the artwork doesn’t align with organizational needs.”
Offer a prize
One of the best ways to ensure higher quality art is to offer a real prize. This can be challenging for small organizations, but offering a modest cash prize communicates that you respect the artists and the process. The phrase, “you can use this in your portfolio” is not helpful. It can be offered, but should never be the only incentive, or positioned as if you’re doing the artist a favor.
Me: How much to fix the roof?
Roofer: $3,000
Me: How about you fix it for free? It cant be that hard, and it’ll look great on your portfolio— Brad Frost (@brad_frost) April 27, 2016
Have a plan for promotion
Sending an email and posting on social media is usually not enough to get quality entries for your contest. Some organizations may find success through limited channels, but we’ve found that it’s helpful to have a broader plan for promotion.
When we created an art contest that was limited to those that were 18 years of age or younger, we sent a targeted communication to all teachers and educational professionals the organization worked with asking them to share it with their students. We also reached out to several art teachers in the organization’s network and asked them to send the details to their peers. We recommend creating a short video explaining the contest and using that on social media. This will help to expand your potential audience.
Get the rights to the artwork
When you’ve chosen a winner, you’ll need to have a legal agreement with the artist. They will need to grant your organization full rights to use the artwork for promotional materials. Share this expectation during the submission process so that individuals understand at the outset of the campaign. Ensure that you have an agreement created and ready to be sent once a winner is selected. Wait to announce the winner until you’ve received the paperwork.
Communicate with losing artists
Once you have the signed paperwork for the winner, let all artists know that their submission was not selected. It’s common for this step to be skipped and doing so risks upsetting volunteers and damaging your organization’s reputation.
Have a Plan B (and maybe C)
When you start this process, take time to create a backup plan. If you don’t receive many entries or don’t like the submitted options, what will you do? Can you fulfill the organization’s need by hiring a professional? Having a secondary option is helpful and necessary.
These considerations will help you host your own art contest. If you need help along the way, please feel to contact us.
Photo by Daniel Chekalov on Unsplash