EXTENDING MEDIUM’S FUNCTIONALITY

Host a Contest on Medium and Let Your Readers Help You Judge the Winners

An easy way to host contests, questionnaires, surveys, quizzes, writing challenges, and so forth

Image purchased from Shutterstock by the author

As a Medium publication owner, have you ever hosted a writing contest? If so, you know how much work the contest was to manage and how much angst you felt when judging writers. Or maybe you’ve never hosted such a contest because you could imagine how much work would be involved.

Well, I’m here to tell you: Contests don’t have to have you tearing your hair out. Contests can be relatively easy to set up and super easy to manage and judge — if you let your readers participate in the process.

Here are the steps to allow your readers to nominate winners, track the stories nominated, and select winners:

(If you have trouble with any of these steps, tag @katharinevalentino in a comment. She will be glad to help.)

Step 1: Create a Google form for nominations and a Google spreadsheet to track nominations

Here’s an example Google form. In your own form, you can have a different header image, title…