Amdall Gallery

The second Amdall Gallery giveaway officially came to an end Tuesday night. There was only one prize this time – a custom portrait of the winner’s choice. I was surprised by how many entries we got with the first contest, but I was certain the second giveaway would have less. The reason? Well, the first involved a small cash prize, so I just assumed only getting some artwork would be less enticing. Apparently I was wrong!

• Custom Portrait Giveaway (this one): 276 entries from 97 different people
• First Giveaway (a couple months ago): 238 entries from 79 different people

That’s pretty great participation, and once again surprised me completely. This level of interest virtually guarantees I’ll do another giveaway. I’m sure I will wait until after I complete the winner’s artwork, but this is a pretty cool way to engage with people and come up with ideas for art subjects. I did learn something from this giveaway though – next time, I’ll make the contest period much shorter. A month is way too long. I actually even forgot about the contest for a couple weeks! I think two weeks is a better time frame for the next one.

On to the winner! The contest ended as Tuesday turned into Wednesday at 12:01am, and I went into the Gleam portal this morning to click the “select winner” button. Gleam picked one entry at random (here’s how they do it) from the list, and that lucky person was….

Michelle from California, who entered via 3 of the 5 methods, and won from her Facebook entry – congratulations to you! You win the grand prize of a custom portrait!

I reached out to Michelle today to see what sort of portrait she’d like to have, and it looks like she’s got a good candidate already. As I mentioned in the contest rules, I plan to share the final product through a post, but I will keep the winner’s name anonymous. Although her first name is shown here, avoiding any name reference in the actual artwork post should be enough precaution against clever search engine/indexing algorithms. Unless the winner just wants her name in there, of course.

And to wrap this up, I had to get into some statistics from this giveaway. As with last time, this giveaway experienced a surge of entries at the beginning and end. I think the initial surge largely comes from the WordPress Reader, and the late push is mostly from the “expiring” section of online-sweepstakes.com. This distribution is more evidence that the contest is too long – if no one is entering during the lengthy middle portion, why not cut that part?

Another interesting data point is, although the free version of Gleam won’t give you names unless it’s a winner, I can tell that nine people entered both this giveaway and the first one. And of those nine, five people completed all possible entries! Anyway, data is always facinating to me, so I’ll post some pivot tables and charts. Thanks to everyone who participated, and I hope to see you for the next one!

Figure 1. Impressions, actions (entries), and users over time (the length of the contest).

Figure 2. Entry actions taken.

Figure 3. Entry percentages by country.

Figure 4. Entries by state and country.