ContestPad provides a powerful voting capability that allows you to setup multiple rounds (periods) of voting.
Each period allows participants vote on their favourite entries according to the voting rules that you setup and the entries you assign to that period.
You can setup so that entries can be voted on per round with shortlisted entries moving on to the next round.
You can also create categories in ContestPad and base voting on a per category level. This allows you to progress entry winners for each category through multiple rounds.
Lastly ContestPad also allows you to run a tournament style competition where entries compete within groups against each other with selected entries from each group progressing to the next round.
ContestPad voting rounds or periods are setup from the settings area under the Vote Schedule tab.
You can create as many voting periods as you require with each period commencing on a start date/time and ending on a date/time.
To configure the rules for your voting period you need to select the "Manage" button. To review or assign entries within a voting period you select the "Entries" button.
Vote Period Manage
The voting rules area includes items such as the start and end date/time, how you want to identify voters, how often voters can vote for the same entry and also how many entries per period, category or voting group a participant can vote for.
Set the date and time (based on timezone setup in global settings) that the voting for this round is going to start and end.
How are you going to identify a voter. This could be based on their email address, IP address of the device they are using or based on them having a user account in the ContestPad environment.
How often a participant can vote for the same entry. You can restrict a participant from voting only once for an entry per voting round or you could allow them to vote every predefined period e.g. every 24hrs.
How many entries a participant can vote for. This can be limited per voting period, per category or per voting group (more on groups later). Note that if per group is selected then this changes the options in the following section.
If you have defined how many entries a participant can vote for as per Round or per Category you then need to specify which entries can be voted on. Essentially this is broken into two types of assignment. Either all entries are automatically eligible to be voted for or no entries are eligible to be voted for and it is then up to the administrator to assign the entries that are eligible for voting manually. This is typically used when you need to narrow down the entries that can be voted on based on specific criteria e.g. the number of votes received in a previous round.
If you have selected to limit the number of entries that can be voted on to be per group, then additional options will be displayed. Groups effectively allow you to break up your entries into different groups and then participants can vote for their favourite entry in each group. If this option is selected then you need to specify the number of groups you want to create and the prefix for each group.
Specify whether you only want entries that are eligible to receive votes to be displayed or whether you want all entries to be displayed and only eligible entries to have the vote button enabled.
Voting Period Entries
The vote period "Entries" area is where you review or set the assignment (or un-assignment) of which entries are eligible to receive votes.
You can allocate and un-allocate entries that are eligible to be voted on in a specific period manually from this screen. You can also assign entries to voting groups manually from here.
Entries can also be sorted based on the number of votes they have received in total or the votes they have received in other specific rounds. This allows you to get the highest vote getters from each round and move them to the next round.
To assign all entries automatically as eligible the Entry eligibility in the Manage area is set to "All entries eligible by default". This means all entries and any new entries received will be automatically eligible to receive votes. You can manually un-assign entries from the eligible entries list which will mean these entries will no longer be eligible to receive votes.
If Entry eligibility is set to "All entries ineligible by default" then all existing and any new entries will not be eligible for voting. In this case you can select ineligible entries and manually assign them to be eligible for voting for this round. This is typically used where you want to only select the highest vote getters from a previous round or select entries based on some other specific criteria for voting in this round.
If you have selected voting groups then all the voting groups will be displayed and you can then manually assign entries into each group to participants to vote on. When groups are configured the gallery page will contain group filter tabs which allows participants to select the group of entries they would like to view and vote on.