Influencer and creator outreach for contest entries

How do you decide which creators are worth approaching?

We decide by who watches them, not by how many. A creator with a modest audience of people who care about your genre, city or profession will do more for a contest than a famous account whose followers are scattered across the world. Your entry needs people who will take a minute to vote.

The vetting checklist

Every name on the shortlist passes these checks, which a person performs by looking at the account itself:

• Audience location and language match where the contest accepts votes.
• Topic overlap: the creator's recent posts are about your kind of entry, not a mixture of everything.
• Comment quality: replies are from different people saying specific things, not a row of identical phrases.
• Consistency: reach and comments look steady across several posts rather than jumping on one.
• Sponsored-post history: earlier paid posts were labelled and the audience reacted normally.
• Analytics on request: the creator can show the platform's own audience figures for their account.

Any account whose audience looks purchased is removed from the list, and we tell you why. We do not buy followers, views or engagement for creators, and we do not place work with creators who did. Our no-bots policy gives the full boundary.

How do paid posts get disclosed?

Every post that a creator is paid or given something to publish says so, in words a viewer cannot miss. Disclosure protects the viewer, the creator and your entry, and an organizer or a platform that sees an undisclosed sponsored post has good reason to look harder at it.

How we handle it

• The creator brief states that the post is paid and asks for a clear label at the start of the caption or the video.
• Where the platform offers its own paid-partnership label, we ask the creator to switch it on.
• We never ask a creator to present a paid post as a personal discovery or to hide the relationship.
• If a creator is given a product, ticket or free service instead of a fee, that counts too, and the same label applies.
• We keep a copy of each published post and its caption, so you can show an organizer exactly what was said.

The creator is responsible for following the rules of their own platform and country, and we make that explicit in the agreement. We check disclosure on the published post and ask for a correction if it is missing. The contest's own terms may add more requirements, such as a required hashtag, and the rules and risk consulting service reads those terms first.

What goes into a creator brief for a contest?

A good brief gives a creator everything needed to post once and well, and leaves room for their own style. Creators who sound like themselves earn trust, and that trust is what brings votes.

Our brief to each creator contains:

1. The contest name, link and deadline, with the time zone.
2. The entry to feature, with the voting steps in order, including any confirmation email, login or captcha, so viewers are not surprised.
3. What is fixed: the disclosure label, the unique tracking link, any hashtag the contest requires.
4. What is free: the opening, the story, the format and the creator's honest opinion of the entry.
5. What is off limits: claims about the prize, claims that a vote is certain to matter, and any pressure to vote more than the contest allows.
6. Approval: when the draft is due, who reads it, how many changes are possible and the date it goes live.

If the entrant is a minor, the brief also records that a parent or guardian has agreed to the entry being featured. Wording for the entry owner to send to supporters of their own is in the templates for asking people to vote.

Which collaboration format suits which contest?

The format should follow the entry, because a creator can present a clip, a photo, a product or a cause in very different ways.

Matching creators to channels

Video creators on TikTok and YouTube fit entries that are clips. Photo and lifestyle creators on Instagram fit visual entries. Professionals on LinkedIn fit business awards, which are covered in more depth on the business awards page. We rarely work with more than a handful of creators at once, so each one can be briefed, checked and reported on properly.

How are results tracked, reported and billed?

Each creator gets a unique link to your entry page, so visits from their post are counted separately from every other source. Where the voting page lets us tie visits to completed votes we do, and where it does not we say so and rely on clicks and the entry counter you can see yourself.

What the report shows

• The post, its date and caption, with the disclosure label visible.
• Visits from that creator's link, and what the platform's own analytics recorded for the post.
• A short note on what the audience said in the comments, because comments often show whether the voting steps were clear.
• A recommendation: repeat, adjust or stop with that creator.

Billing

There are separate lines on the invoice. Our fee covers vetting, outreach, briefing, coordination, approval and reporting. Creator fees are agreed with each creator before anything is published and shown separately. If you want a creator's post boosted as an ad, that ad spend is paid to the platform and invoiced apart from our fee, as described under paid promotion. We confirm the full quote in writing before work starts; the budget planner gives a range first.

What can a creator campaign not do, and what do you send first?

A creator controls their own post, their own schedule and their own audience, and we do not. A creator may decline, post late, or have a post removed by their platform; the agreement says what happens then, and we never treat a single post as a certainty. Followers who see a post still make their own choice about voting.

To begin, send the contest link and rules, your entry link, the deadline, the countries that may vote and any creators you already know, through the free contest analysis. We reply with the rules read, a shortlist approach and a written quote. Our overview of the whole offer is on the contest marketing page.

How it works

1. Rules and audience readWe read the contest terms and define who your voters are, where they live and where they spend time.
2. Shortlist with vetting notesA person checks each creator's audience, comments and past paid posts, and you see the notes.
3. Agreement and briefTerms, fee, disclosure and the creator brief are agreed in writing before any content is made.
4. Draft approval and publicationYou and we read the draft against the contest rules, then it goes live with the paid label on.
5. Tracking and wrap-upPer-post links feed a plain report and a recommendation to repeat, adjust or stop.