Six months ago we held a giveaway to celebrate the release of our Discord server. The plan initially was for BuiltByBit to provide the prizes, but we had some generous members of our community offer that they wanted to include prizes to be given away. We accepted these few users, and the generosity unexpectedly spiralled to a point where we had 43 contributors who pledged $6,000 USD of prizes, which resulted in there being 318 individual winners. This was a phenomenal result considering we only had contributions open for a few days, and unsurprisingly our community loved to have so many valuable prizes to win.
The plan is to host a similar community giveaway throughout December, in the style of a Christmas advent calendar. From the first of December until Christmas day, we will be hosting a giveaway every single day with prizes pledged by our generous community. Each day the prizes will slowly increase in value, until the final day on Christmas where there will be the largest.
There will be similar entry requirements for this giveaway as there were in the previous giveaways. Users must have synced their BuiltByBit and Discord accounts together, and must have been registered for at least the past few weeks to limit abuse. Importantly, each user will only be able to win one single prize, so we will be encouraging the community to only enter giveaways for prizes that they actually want to win.
We have far more time to plan this giveaway than we had for our first community giveaway, and now that we have more experience with running these events we’re confident that this will be a huge attraction both in the BuiltByBit community, and the wider Minecraft server owner audience.
In previous giveaways we gave absolutely nothing back to our generous contributors. This begs begs the question: why did they contribute?
The main reason prizes were pledged was simply to give back to the community. Many contributors have had great success from using our platform and so they’ve taken the opportunity to give back to the friends that they’ve made through their time on the site.
Giving away prizes is also a great way to gain exposure. In each of the giveaways we provide a link to the product/service being given away, and so users will look at the product/service. Hundreds, or even thousands of people are expected to be looking through the giveaways each day to enter.
The third reason for contributions is because the prizes can act as a lead magnet to get people using your service. Many hosting companies or service teams provide credit so that winners will use their free server for a few months and then continue renewing it after their credit runs out.
Contributors who provide rewards with a direct cost associated with them will receive an exclusive Giveaway contributor medal for amounts greater than $50. For services/resource licenses/other rewards a contribution greater than $100 will earn you the medal.
In our previous community giveaway the most common types of prizes could be divided into eight categories: