THE IDA PICK LAUNCHPAD6 FOR CAPTURE THE DARK PHOTO COMPETITION
The International Dark-Sky Association were looking to create more awareness about light pollution by engaging photographers globally and the results were stunning.
THE CHALLENGE
The International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) are the leading organization combating light pollution worldwide. Light pollution is a common problem globally and IDA’s mission is to create awareness of its impacts to both people and natural wildlife.
IDA have previously leveraged photographic competitions as a way to connect those who’ve never laid eyes on the natural dark sky and to the universe hidden behind the veil of skyglow. By engaging photographers globally through competitions, IDA have the ability to access hard to obtain images and then reuse these for further awareness campaigns.
IDA were managing their competition using Google forms and file sharing tools. These proved cumbersome to manage, provided a poor experience for participants and overall limited the success of the campaign.
IDA BEGIN THEIR SEARCH FOR A CONTEST PLATFORM
IDA realised that they needed to improve the experience for contestants, judges and staff if they wanted to scale the competition. “We wanted a platform that was able to streamline the whole competition experience as well as make it easier for us to manage” says Bettymaya Foott - Director of Engagement Dark Sky Association.
Some of the key platform objectives included the ability to:
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Increase the engagement to create broader awareness through the competition
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Facilitate funding through sponsors and online fundraising to create a financially neutral or positive outcome
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Source “compelling photography” content that can connect people with the natural dark sky Scaling and managing this campaign meant finding a platform partner that would:
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Create a beautiful and polished experience that aligned with the IDA brand and attracted suitable sponsors,
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Give photographers an intuitive and seamless way of submitting photographs and sharing these with family and friends,
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Seamlessly engage the general public to help select the most compelling photographs through public voting,
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Provide a streamlined management experience which includes collection, approval, vote scoring and judging management, • Allow for donations to be accepted through public voting.
Challenge
Create broader awareness of light pollution and how it effects the globe
Capture compelling and reusable photography
Attract sponsors and collect donations through the competition
Solution
Provided a polished online photo competition website
Provided a simple submission and approval process
Provided a secure voting solution that enabled general public engagement.
Provided formal judging portal that was easy for judges to navigate
Services Offered
ContestPad Premium Package
White labelled website
Style and configuration consulting services
Results
100% increase in submissions
Over 16,300 people’s choice votes
Over 45,000 website visits
The impact of Light Pollution | Constantine Themelis
Greece
LAUNCHPAD6 DELIVERS
IDA looked for different options. Launchpad6 was the only solution that ticked all the requirements:
IDA PLATFORM CAPABILITIES MATCH REQUIREMENTS
✓ Launchpad6 allows for seamless submission and approval of photo submissions,
✓ Launchpad6 natively supported the automatic creation of a photo gallery for people to share and submit votes for people’s choice awards,
✓ Launchpad6 provided a great polished experience,
✓ The website could be easily branded and styled to match the specifics of the IDA and IDA’s sponsors,
✓ The competition could accept vote payments to help facilitate the funding of the competition and cause
✓ A seamless judging experience for panel delegates to professionally score the photography.
A ONLINE AWARDS SUCCESS!
The first IDA photo competition with Launchpad6 achieved outstanding results The investment paid off, resulting in an unprecedented global response to the contest, nearly doubling the number of entries from the previous year and more than doubling the number of countries reached.
The contest achieved over 45,000 visits, 16,000+ votes and over 1,100 submissions to the competition across 132 countries.
Additionally a lot of traffic related to the competition was generated on the main IDA website which created even more awareness.
The platform also provided a great experience to judges, “The online voting system worked flawlessly, congratulations!” said one of the main judges for the competition.
The Launchpad6 solution was able to provide a completely integrated, end to end online photo competition platform and is the now the standard platform for IDA’s future competition and awards.
“We previously used other form tools and file sharing solutions but they were clunky and difficult to use ”
BETTYMAYA FOOTT,
Director of Engagement, IDA