FAL
I didn't get to see the categories you posted,

Amanda posted her sample form: http://www.salttheholly.com/nominate.htm

Right now, she's using all the DD categories.

I really think that that would be too much. Last year there were categories that didn't get enough votes like best backgrounds.

Hard to say whether that should be attributed to categories or to bad promotion. A lot of people missed the awards last year and it was a "first time." Plus the process of voting/nomination was going through a page for each category and entering a comment, wait for loading, go to the next page, etc. -- not a single form.

More awards could actually encourage more participation (partly because people stand a better chance of being recognized for something), and a single, simple form will encourage nominations in all categories.

I remember last year not really feeling like nominating or voting for "best overall" or the other categories -- because I felt that my votes really didn't mean much. Some big popular comic would win regardless. That's the real problem with having just a few "big" awards as opposed to numerous fun "little" ones.

Besides that, it wouldn't hurt to give it a try. I think going an entirely different route with the categories, numbers of awards, nomination process, etc. is a great idea. It was a debate last year whether to have many or few awards. They went with few, so I say let's try the other way now. ;) -- And if we don't get a response for a number of categories, we can drop them and have something to build upon for next year.

Hey FAL - thanks for your input/advice! Before I mocked up the form, I really struggled with this more/less categories thing. A shorter ballot would be probably be awesome, but yeah - all the forum threads from last year were sad that x category or y category were left out. I admit that I'm a little concerned about some categories not getting much feedback... We'll see what happens ^.^ And like UB said, we can absolutely adjust our stategy next year!

It'll pretty much be a learning process just like running a comic from year to year. Each year you're going to end up learning new things to do better the next year. I think the problem last year was seriously tied to the voting system. I didn't even bother trying to vote because it looked so non-user-friendly.

You should have a PQ waiting in your inbox. Unless the PQ system is not sending mine again.

Quick little grammatical revision for clarity about http://www.salttheholly.com/nominate.htm .

You wrote:
Protagonist Name: Protagonist Comic:
Antagonist: Antagonist Comic:

It should be:
Protagonist's Name: Protagonist's Comic:
Antagonist's Name: Antagonist's Comic:



That should make it easier (sorry if I am being the grammar police!).

Also, Would it make sense to separate Abstract and Random, and add Humor?
(What do you think? I'm not sure which is better.)
Maybe a Humor/Random category?
Just bouncing off ideas.

Grammar police away, Bocaj! Normally, I catch that sort of thing - clearly, I'm off my game these days ^.^

I will make those changes the next time I do some updates. Hmm, it's hard for me to separate abstract and random - if you can provide me samples of each to clarify, I'd be happy to separate.

I put a humor category in the writing section.

amanda
Grammar police away, Bocaj! Normally, I catch that sort of thing - clearly, I'm off my game these days ^.^

I will make those changes the next time I do some updates. Hmm, it's hard for me to separate abstract and random - if you can provide me samples of each to clarify, I'd be happy to separate.

I put a humor category in the writing section.

Oh, I missed that humor category!
My bad!

Random:


Experimental:



Although, I understand, if you don't want to separate them. There are very few Experimental comics (at least that I read (I wanna find more!!)), and many people consider Random a sect of Experimental.

Hey all,

Just like to throw some ideas out here.

Judging:
Despite my overwhelming hatred for the genre, why not take a nod from reality TV and have a few 'professionals' to help sit-in as moderators? I know it was discussed in the thread, but I just wanted to mention it again. The moderators are not final vote decision types but like people have said, they help refine the categories.

If anyone would like to emulate it, first round you have the flood of nominations which the judge/moderators either give a 'pass' or 'fail' to. Then the votes are counted from what's left. This should work well if the judges know they've got to par down all the nominations to 'X' per category.

Skoolmunkee, how active can you be in this? Since you handle the features I think it qualifies you as a 'pro'.


Promotion:
I think it would be a given that anyone nominated will want to promote the awards. Still, it might make sense for everyone in this thread to send out five PQ's to their DD friends, noting the contest, and then asking them to send out five PQ's to their DD friends doing the same. Very simple word-of-mouth campaign. To make it easier, why not whip up a template along the lines of:

"This is your official invitation to attend the 2008 Drunk Duck Awards! To visit the nominations page, go here: (url). (Brief explanation of voting process, when and how).

To make this year's awards the best yet, we've also included five additional invitations for you to share with your smartest, most tasteful, and active DD friends. Please use them wisely."

I use the approach of "5 of your best DD friends" to make it a little less spammy (you're not sending it to everyone, just the ones with taste) and yet to encourage it to actually get done since it's more like an exclusive invitation. Also, you give people a rule ("Don't bring more than five") and they're more likely to break it which only promotes it more.

Finally, maybe we could even get some off-site advertising? Depending on my schedule and situation I might be able to research some and perhaps even donate some. This would be great for DD as a whole, too!

Category Suggestion
I only have two requests: One is to separate Dailies from Weeklies from Sporadic; the time constraints alone usually have an impact on the comic overall. To qualify for a Daily/Weekly, you need to update with non-filler content on a regular daily basis (say a 75% of the time?). I'm also going to say Dailies would be 4-7 updates per week, Weeklies are 1-3 updates per week.

The other request is to separate colour from B&W.

This will likely bloat the categories a bit so a few will have to trimmed or combined most likely.

smkinoshita
Judging:

That's already sort of the plan, I think. A group of volunteers will check out most popular nominees and weed them out to decide on a top five.

smkinoshita
Promotion:I think it would be a given that anyone nominated will want to promote the awards.

The big problem is that we have NOTHING unless people participate in the nomination process. Though with awards in all DD categories plus some fun ones, people might be more into promoting them since even "less popular" comics stand a chance of winning. (As opposed to last year. No incentive to promote when your comic and/or your favorites don't have any chance of winning anything.)

I think a big help would be getting it in the news posts, stickied in forums, and plugged on people's comics in author's notes, etc. For me, that has always been more effective advertising than PQ or email. (In fact, I consider such promotion a nuisance/annoyance and will usually turn me away from events.)

smkinoshita
Category SuggestionI only have two requests: One is to separate Dailies from Weeklies from Sporadic; the time constraints alone usually have an impact on the comic overall. To qualify for a Daily/Weekly, you need to update with non-filler content on a regular daily basis (say a 75% of the time?). I'm also going to say Dailies would be 4-7 updates per week, Weeklies are 1-3 updates per week.

The other request is to separate colour from B&W.

Eh. I think that's pushing it. There are categories for B&W and color. Separating ALL awards as such wouldn't work, imo. There are comics that switched from color to B&W or vice versa. And when you start separating things like that, you reduce the chances for enough nominees to go into voting.

For example, say we want 3 to 5 good candidates for final voting. We end up with 7 good color candidates for a category but only 2 B&W. If separated, that would mean we have to throw out the B&W category altogether even if one or both are very popular and very good, even better than the colored entries. -- Or what if we end up with two good B&W nominees and one good colored one? Throw them all out? Use them?

Aside from that, separating comics at all, aside from whatever single element the award is for, makes things unnecessarily complicated. We can have an award for B&W or colored, but B&W + western? Colored + dialogue? Let's keep things simple. We don't want to scare people off. ;)

I have to also say that I don't think "update schedule" is a good way to categorize either. The impact of schedule on comic content quality is minor at best. Update schedule usually has more to do with people's own real life commitments and schedules than the type of comic they are producing. Maybe one person makes a page a week because they put a full week into the artwork, but someone else does it because they only have weekends off. Plus, many comics have to change update schedules. Maybe they were daily, then became twice a week, went back to daily, had to go once every two weeks for a while, etc. Usually their work doesn't change much when they change their update days. They simply change because of changing work schedules, free time, etc. -- Imo, I would neither separate by schedule or have any schedule-based awards.

I agree with Vickie on this one. We have to keep it simple and manageable or we won't get significant participation. Your idea is sound but in this environment, it would be too much for most people to deal with. Most people can only handle an easy form with straightforward instructions (which is probably why I never bother to itemize my income tax forms).

And people change on their scheduling. I can use myself for example. Due East used to update twice a week regularly, then we went to weekly. The last few months, it's been more like once a month. Since these are all-volunteer webcomics, real life does get in the way occasionally.

usedbooks
Eh. I think that's pushing it. There are categories for B&W and color. Separating ALL awards as such wouldn't work, imo. There are comics that switched from color to B&W or vice versa. And when you start separating things like that, you reduce the chances for enough nominees to go into voting.

True, true. If my brain was working just a tad bit better I'd... crud. Like I said, if my brain was working better I'd suggest something good. But right now I'm really tired and my brain is not working. So the main point of this post is just to say "Right right, I agree, not a hot suggestion". Other than I would still like to help with gett'n the word out 'bout the awards.

I'm kind of wondering if we couldn't maybe get some real celebrities ( Ok, that sounds way meaner than I want it to, but I'm too tired to come up with another way of saying it. ) into this to help us get it some attention and promotion just by having their name connected as a special guest judge or presenter or something. I think I've still got Jason Embury's email address in my PQ archive somewhere since I never clean it out. Maybe some other people could try contacting any creators from bigger comics out there to see if they'd be willing to help us out with resources and PR?

This could eventually be a huge chance for nominated comics and winners to get some promotion and recognition in a bigger community than just DD if people are willing to spend the time to make it into such a thing. It could even help DD become a more established and influential group in the webcomics community. Right now, it seems to me like we're kind of a closed community in that for the most part the majority of DD comic readers are other DD members. The DD awards could be a big draw if we can get some outside celebrities and audiences involved.

Good idea, Iba. Opening up the community is an excellent suggestion. As far as "real" celebrities go, it all depends on your definition of "web comic celebrity". Same goes with "bigger comics" since it's all relative.

But if I'm getting your vibe, what we need to do is go find the top web comic creators and invite them to act as our celebrity judging panel. The nice thing is for them to become involved is they get more promotion (for example, I have no idea who Jason Embury is) to the DD community, while they get exposure to our community at the same time.

If it can be done in the proposed schedule, go for it. But it might be a little last minute to do that this year. (And I would be loathe to postpone the awards any more. When you keep planning things and pushing things back, nothing gets done.)

I'm with you there, Vickie. Push backs are like a cancer.

So, working in the deadline:
TIME START: Today, July 30
Format: (Days left) Item
(1) Deadline for categories: July 31 -- that's tomorrow, folks!
(2) Nominations go LIVE: August 1 -- and that's Friday, folks!
(11) Last nominations accepted: 11:59:59pm August 10
(18) First Tally finalized: August 17
(19) Final voting goes live: August 18
(25) Last votes accepted: 11:59:59pm August 24
(33) "Presenters" have submissions done by September 1
(34) Awards begin to go live: September 2

As much as I love Iba's idea of celebrity judges, there's no way we're going to get them to come out with the timeline we have. We only have 11 days before the last nominations are accepted, 19 days before live final voting, and 25 days before the votes are all counted.

Therefore, we're going to need to stagger the promotion here. We essentially have to promote the Nomination Phase, Voting Phase, and Award phase. And oh crap, I'd write more but my lunch is over and I have a bit of a tight deadline today. I'll try to continue this later!

Amanda
Publicity Ideas:
1. Possibly a stickied, red thread in every forum during while the nominations are going on?
2. Newspost Plugs
3. Plug it in our comics, in our forum sigs, etc. Hopefully get some high profiles comics to do the same - besides, I'm sure they WANT the recognition for their hard work, right? =]
4. Maybe do a couple Project Wonderful ad campaigns on some DD comics (I can spare a couple bucks for that sort of thing).

I started a PW ad campaign to run from Aug 1st to 24th. I don't have much money there, but I'm doing what I can. ;)

(Also, I made a button graphic 117 x 30)

smkinoshita
Good idea, Iba. Opening up the community is an excellent suggestion. As far as "real" celebrities go, it all depends on your definition of "web comic celebrity". Same goes with "bigger comics" since it's all relative.

But if I'm getting your vibe, what we need to do is go find the top web comic creators and invite them to act as our celebrity judging panel. The nice thing is for them to become involved is they get more promotion (for example, I have no idea who Jason Embury is) to the DD community, while they get exposure to our community at the same time.

I was just thinking in long-term ideas there. I doubt we can get them involved at this point unless they suddenly come up with a bit of free time. But there's no reason why people can't start making a first draft letter ( I would make sure that if you choose to write a letter that it's a damn good letter after all. ) for next year I suppose. But by no means should we push the date of this year's awards back. Just make a few plans for it to happen next year.

For the most part, when I say celebrities, I'm thinking of trying to get some of the bigger comics on the internet like Questionable Content or Sam and Fuzzy involved. I'm imagining that if we got people like Jeph Jacques or Sam Logan involved with their audiences of several hundred thousand at least, we could make a big dent.

And to answer the question of who Jason Embury is: he's the guy who did all the colouring for Hero By Night, which until recently was one of the few comics on DD that was really well-known outside of the community.

*slides in* Hey! I'm here! I've been reading the stuff, just haven't had much time to chime in. Wheeeee. Not much I can say that hasn't already been said. There are a ton of great suggestions coming in, and I'm sorry we can't use them all. This is a huge learning experience for everyone involved - and we can absolutely refine the process for the 2009 voting.

I really think, with the right publicity this time around, we have a decent system.

Speaking of publicity, I tried contacting some people who actually work on the Duck for their backing/support - no dice. No response, actually ^.^ Either they're super busy, indifferent, or in Tahiti. *shrug* No matter.

Iba, I think trying to get big name artists/writers to publicize and throw support behind this would be fantastic - let's aim for that next year for sure.

Really excited about this - UsedBooks, let me know if there are any DD sites you want me to hit up for Project Wonderful ads. I've got a few bucks in my PW account I can use.

amanda
Really excited about this - UsedBooks, let me know if there are any DD sites you want me to hit up for Project Wonderful ads. I've got a few bucks in my PW account I can use.

I just made a campaign targeting cheap space (whenever bidding is low) on any site with the tag "webcomic" using a half banner or button. You can aim for specific sites if you want. It would be much nicer if we could just convince DD members to post a banner/button "for free" since it is a community benefit rather than a personal one we're shelling out our pennies for. ^_^;

(Everyone viewing this thread, please post a link somewhere. ;) )

I'll be putting a link into each newspost since people almost always check anything of interest there. Do we want to link this thread or the voting form with it? I would think the voting form.

lba
I'll be putting a link into each newspost since people almost always check anything of interest there. Do we want to link this thread or the voting form with it? I would think the voting form.

I'd say the voting form. I'm changing all my links from the thread to the vote page on Aug. 1st.

Amanda, are you gonna use the same url to post the winners/presentations after the votes are tallied?

amanda
Iba, I think trying to get big name artists/writers to publicize and throw support behind this would be fantastic - let's aim for that next year for sure.

Well, we could ask Amelius for a plug, she is nice and her comic is number one on DD.

Sorry for taking the direction of the thread in a different direction, but I was just wondering, can a person nominate their own comic? I know the rules said that they can't vote for their own comic, but I wasn't sure if it was the same regarding nominations.

I think it makes sense to not be allowed to nominate yourself. Really it is just bad manners to nominate oneself. Btw, nominations are votes, since only the comics with the most nominations will be listed for the final round of voting. ;)

I'm pretty sure that's what amanda meant when saying don't vote for yourself. nominate=vote. If not, I apologize. (But I still think it is bad form to nominate oneself.)

Yeah, I figured as much. Just wanted clarification. :)

Bocaj
Well, we could ask Amelius for a plug, she is nice and her comic is number one on DD.

Go for it Bocaj. If nothing else it would help spread the word across DD.

And the voting form it is for the links.

Just as a heads up, when people link to the ballot, use
http://www.drunkduck.com/Drunk_Duck_Awards_2008
as the URL instead of the salttheholly.com one. Just to keep it on the Duck. I'll activate the salttheholly.com one too, though - just in case. All the results will still be sent to Iba and me.

lba

Bocaj
Well, we could ask Amelius for a plug, she is nice and her comic is number one on DD.

Go for it Bocaj. If nothing else it would help spread the word across DD.

And the voting form it is for the links.

I'll ask her when we get the nominations up and running!

For the record, once everything gets started on Friday (or late Thursday night, more likely), ALL the official announcements/voting/presentations/etc will be at the Drunk Duck Awards 2008 url.