We learned our lesson!
There is pretty much no way to have a contest, that is bound to get emotional and personal posts, and be able to select from those posts a 'winner', much less a first, second and third place. How can we 'judge' some of the amazing posts that were submitted to this contest? How can we judge that for which someone is thankful?
This was a bit of oversight on our part. We thought "have a contest, get great entries, pick a winner". We never thought "have a contest, get a ton of very moving and personal entries, shed a tear or ten reading them, identify with many of them, and have no idea how to pick a winner".
Had we known that, we would have made the community pick the winner. You live and you learn.
In reading through these posts, it became very obvious to us that our own feelings and life experiences were probably clouding our ability to figure out which posts were the best. In fact, there was no best. Every post had something that was worthy of winning.
But, we have prizes, and someone needs to win them. So we plowed ahead and picked out a few posts that touched us in some way or had a message that we thought was important. There were tons of other posts that touched us and had an important message. In some ways, these people just got lucky I suppose. We couldn't pick a winner. So instead of first, second and third, we are going to have 3 winners. The three winners in each category will split the prize money (each person will get $116) and ActiveRain has agreed to give each winner the 5000 points for first place.
Every entry is going to get an extra 500 points. Points will be awarded this week.
And now, some really great posts.......
What would you do with 3 hours of extra time each week?
Mike Jones would write poetry....and it would be good! This was when we first realized judging was going to be based on our own experiences and that it would be impossible to be impartial. This is a great poem and it was such a different approach than anyone else took. Not only did he tell us what he would do, he actually did it. A theme started to emerge with this post as well....
John Juarez realizes what you do with your free time is a choice. We saw this theme across a number of blogs. John does an excellent job articulating it. Lots of folks realized that making time to do the things in life that are important is a matter of choice. We think DocuSign can give you more choice with more free time, but ultimately you have to make the decision to spend your time on things that are important
Mark Edwards struck a cord with Bob. It was a collaborative effort at AR and DocuSign to find the winners. Bob Stewart, ActiveRain Chief Evangelist helped pick the finalists and he was adamant this post get in there. "With all the bad stories out recently about coaches, they are still an instrumental part of the upbringing of millions of kids across the country" said Bob. We agree. Invaluable in every local community, people donating their time to help coach our youth is really important. Mark shares his experience with that.
For What am I Thankful?
Lina Robertson Jones gets a chance to see her donations in action. We're most certain she would have preferred never to have seen her donations to the RE/MAX Children's Miracle Network in action, but when he son got sick she got a chance to be thankful for something to which she had been a donor over the years.
Jeanean Gendron is thankful for the joy of living a full life. Even after losing her son three years ago, Jeanean shares how she still finds things for which to be thankful and reminds us to squeeze our spouse, children, family or friends just a little bit tighter tonight.
Amy Hahn gets unique and shares 365 things for which she is thankful. This couldn't have been easy. Amy shares 365 different things she is thankful for, both large and small. Very original Amy!
Thank you From DocuSign
This was a great experience for us. Thank you for allowing us to share in your stories. If you still haven't had a chance to try out DocuSign for your business and figure out how you can save 3 hours every week (maybe more if you read some of the posts from the contest) we wanted to extend a special offer to you. You can save over $50 in 2012 if you decide to incorporate DocuSign in your business. Give it a try, thousands of others have gone before you and are saving time and resources to use in other parts of their business.
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