Comping Compulsions!
One question that I’m often asked is “how many competitions should I be entering each month?” To which the answer is invariably “how long is a piece of string”! But as we enter a new year, when people traditionally resolve to change things for the better, it seems a good time to actually address this question properly.
I suppose that the simple answer to our conundrum is that comping, like any hobby, must be enjoyable. And the moment that it stops being enjoyable for whatever reason, then this is a good time to look closely at your approach. There’s no need to abandon comping completely of course, but in a hobby as diverse as ours there are so many different paths that you can take. It’s simply a case of finding the right one for you. Easy!
The general advice for someone just starting out is to enter as many competitions as possible, especially those with lots of prizes. This is a good strategy for a beginner, since it gets them into the swing of things and will hopefully provide a confidence boost when one or two prizes (at least!) turn up. Likewise, someone dipping their toes into the wonderful world of tiebreaker comps for the first time will probably benefit from an initial torrent of entries concentrating on promotions with lots of prizes. If all goes to plan, this should result in the opportunity to hone skills and learn the ropes while at the same time reaping a few modest rewards to keep the confidence going.
But this approach is fraught with dangers. Human nature being what it is, if this ‘quantity’ strategy leads to lots of prizes, then a comper might simply enter more and more comps in an attempt to increase the prize count. And if it results in no prizes at all, then surely by entering even more comps your luck must change. Mustn’t it?!
Whether it be trying to perpetuate a winning streak, or attempting to cover your losses, you could find yourself on a slippery slope. This is how bookmakers make their money, and I could at this point trot out the old clichés about you never seeing a poor bookie – and that it’s no accident that they always have three paying in windows but only one paying out window! Some people will argue, of course, that comping most certainly isn’t the same as gambling. A fair point, but it is similar in many respects. The purchase of a qualifier is effectively your stake, and the completion of your entry will invariably involve you ‘playing the odds’ in your favour – be it with a brilliant slogan or even a nicely decorated postcard. As with ‘real’ gambling the time and money spent on our hobby can soon add up, and this is where the problems can start.
I think that most compers have, at some time, been down this “quantity over quality” path. Sometimes as a deliberate strategy, but sometimes purely accidentally. You usually only realise that something is wrong when you have a house full of unopened qualifiers that “will come in handy one day” – even worse when those qualifiers are things like household appliances filling up your spare room! The arrival of a prize is no longer accompanied by excitement, probably because you have no use (or space!) whatsoever for it, and you’re simply ‘winning for winning’s sake’. You’re spending so long on your entries that you have no time for anything else. You start missing closing dates, start panicking, and you suddenly realise that comping isn’t fun any more. You can also find yourself completely losing your sense of proportion. Never mind that terrible flood that devastated a town and destroyed the homes and livelihoods of hundreds of people… wasn’t there a handling house nearby?! Hopefully your precious competition entries didn’t get too soggy, and surely a few feet of water won’t delay deliveries or the judging too much! Basically, the word ‘competition’ becomes the most important thing to you. It matters not that the qualifier is costly and unwanted, that the prize is useless, or that the odds of winning are infinitesimal. Before long, you find yourself trawling half of the country for an elusive entry form simply “because it exists”, and buying any product or publication with ‘WIN’ on the outside. If it’s a competition, then as a comper you are obliged to enter it.
Does this all sound horribly familiar?
The twin enemies of compers finding themselves in this position are time and money. It’s an obvious concern if you start spending more money than you can afford. It’s always a good idea to set aside a budget specifically for your comping activities, since costs can have a habit of mounting up without you realising it. Even if you only do ‘free’ draws, for example, there’s postage and stationery to think about it. Plus the cost of magazine subscriptions, entry form suppliers, internet, phone and text costs… it soon adds up! Whatever your budget, it’s obviously important that you stick to it.
It’s equally important that you manage your time effectively. It’s no use if you spend so long looking for comps, finding forms, buying qualifiers etc. that you don’t have any time left to actually sit down and do the competitions properly. Chances are, you’re never going to think up an unbeatable, original tiebreaker if you only get around to looking at a batch of twenty entry forms the day before their closing date. At first, this might not be a problem since your ‘quantity’ approach means that you’re entering fifty chestnuts or, at best, lacklustre and unfinished originals a month so you’re statistically likely to scoop one or two prizes purely by default. But this can soon become an unfulfilling chore, and when you hit a dry patch (and every comper does) the effects and general disillusionment are always magnified because of the time and money you have frantically – and sometimes by this stage, grudgingly - invested.
Thankfully, these periods of comp-ulsion (groan) rarely last forever. You soon reach a time when the money and/or the time simply runs out. But it’s not necessary for you to throw in the comping towel completely once you’ve been made to see the light. You simply have to readjust your strategy so that the hobby suits you. You must control the comping… and not the other way round!
It can sometimes be difficult to make the initial ‘break’ and to actually start ignoring competitions, but be selective you must. This means only entering competitions where you can reasonably make use of a qualifier, and where the prize is actually wanted. If you think that you might sell a prize or pass it on to friends or family, make sure that the rules of the competition allow this and that winning won’t lead to even more time and money being wasted. Also, be sensible and realistic when gauging the chances of your winning a prize in a particular competition.
I appreciate that we all have to start somewhere, and that practise makes perfect etc., but the chances are that if you’ve never written a winning slogan in your life then you’ll not break your duck in a competition where there’s just one prize, especially if you can only afford to allocate five minutes of your precious time to the task anyway. So perhaps build up slowly to these, and use the time and resources that you save to concentrate on more modest targets. It’s often a good idea to limit the number of tiebreakers that you write in a month in any event. You can then put more time and effort into them, and less pressure should mean that you get into a particular ‘mindset’ easier which should hopefully result in ideas coming together faster and better. A quick glance through a few comping books on my bookshelf suggests that the ‘optimum’ number of tiebreaker comps that you should enter in a month ranges from just one to a maximum of six. So, even the ‘experts’ disagree – which means that once again you should go with your own feelings and stick with a figure that makes you happy. But clearly it’s best that a realistic limit of some sort is adhered to, on this all of the experts most definitely agree.
Comping has without doubt changed over the last few years, and the hobby can quite easily take over your life if you let it. Back in the ‘good old days’ there were fewer comps, with fewer variations and fewer entry routes. The hobby could still take up lots of time, but in a more ‘fulfilling’ way. Many comps had more challenging tasks, and without the internet or as many widely available solution magazines as there are today, this invariably meant regular trips to the library. And while you were looking for a particular fact, you’d almost certainly stumble across something even more fascinating so would spend ages reading a completely different book to the one that you originally went in for!
The internet, and especially search engines which take you straight to the information you want, mean that such pleasant – and rewarding – detours are things of the past sadly, but today’s comper still needs to be aware of more modern diversions. From the dilemma of deciding whether the instant win, postal, phone, text, or web entry route affords the best chance of winning, to agonising over whether printed postcards are preferable to handwritten ones. And with chatrooms and newsgroups on the web, it’s easier than ever to find out about hundreds of competitions… unfortunately, you may find yourself spending so long talking about them with your new found friends online that you don’t have any time to actually enter them! At the other end of the web spectrum, a quick look at the main comping newsgroup will reveal a world of ‘bulk’ comping. A huge list of competitions, and woe betide anyone who doesn’t include a direct link straight to a comp page and the accompanying answers to save those precious seconds! A world where one click will fill in an entire entry form for you, or will automatically generate an email to enable you to enter a comp. Actually, make that 200 emails since you’ve very cunningly created hundreds of different email addresses to improve your chances.
All very well, of course, until that fictitious cat of yours wins a non-transferable dream holiday!
You may have cottoned on to the fact that I’m not overly impressed by web comps. For me, most of the fun in comping comes from the thrill of the chase rather than necessarily the prize at the end of it. So I can’t quite work out what fun there is in sitting in front of a computer all day blindly clicking an ‘Enter’ button for hundreds, if not thousands, of competitions, often not knowing or caring what the prize may be. But each to their own I suppose. No doubt these people think I’m just as mad for spending days on end searching out entry forms in supermarkets! Which only serves to illustrate, I guess, just how diverse our hobby has become. And if you try to embrace every single element of it, then you could find yourself struggling.
So, at this time of resolution, why not organise your own comping strategy a little better? Try to become more focussed, go for quality rather than quantity, and you might be pleasantly surprised. You could even start enjoying the hobby a bit more!
Wishing you all a happy – and lucky – new year.
Smid x
|
