Within few months of launching Squadhelp, we have helped hundreds of startups and online businesses for their branding and marketing needs. Our growing community has now submitted more than 40,000 company name suggestions, taglines and participated in several viral marketing, video and testing contests. Today we are pleased to announce several new features as well as some important policy changes.
1. Fee Structure
We have standardized our fee structure and will now charge a flat fee of $25 for contest holders to list contests on our site. Note - this listing fee is in addition to the award amount that gets passed on to the winning contestant. This will ensure that contest holders do not get "penalized" for launching higher award contests (earlier we used to charge a fee that was based upon 10% of award amount)
2. Payout for Winners
Effective immediately, we will charge a 10% handling fee for paying out award fees to the contestants. For example, for a $100 contest, the winner will receive $90 in their Paypal account when they request a payout.
Why are we doing this?
Moving money — especially when it’s between countries — can be very expensive, and we normally do this twice for each contest: once to our super-secure holding account, then once to the winning contestant’s home country. Each of these transactions incurs merchant fees, admin costs, bank fees, and a slew of other potential charges, all of which we will pay for with our 10% handling fee.
3. Guaranteed Contests
We have now introduced the concept of Guaranteed Contests.
When a contest holder selects a guaranteed contest, they formally guarantee a winner will be chosen and the prize money will be awarded. These contests have had the prize money prepaid to Squadhelp, who awards the prize to the winning contestant at the end of the contest.This eliminates any risk of contest getting canceled after it has been started.
You can easily spot Guaranteed Contest by a guaranteed contest logo on the top of a contest page or on the browse contests page.
4. 100% Satisfaction Guarantee
We will now offer a 100% satisfaction on all contests (with the exception of Guaranteed Contests). This means that if a contest holder doesnt like any of the entries, they can request for a full refund. In this scenario, no winner will be chosen for the contest and the contest will be canceled. Note: We have received raving reviews from most of our contest holders and we are confident that this situation will not happen very often. This is why, we believe offering a 100% guarantee will provide a peace of mind to our contest holders, and we will actually see an even higher level of interest in this service.Again, this satisfaction guarantee doesnt apply to Guaranteed Contests which are non-refundable.
Other New Features
In addition to above changes, we have also implemented some new features based upon feedback from our users:
1. Ability to Export Results
Contest holders will now be able to export all submissions/entries into an excel file for ease of winner selection. Given that most contests receive more than 250 submissions, ability to export will allow the contest holders to more easily select a winner.
2. Ability to send private messages
Contest holders will now be able to send private messages/emails to any of the contestants. This will allow the ability for iterative feedback between contest holder and the contestant community. Note - contestants can also send a private message to the contest holder by submitting a private comment on the contest page.
3. Badges
Very soon, our users will begin earning badges for achieving important milestones. For examples, users will be able to earn badges for participating in more than 10 contests, or on winning single or multiple contests. This will allow our users to show-off their level of quality and involvement in Squadhelp. In the future, this would be particularly useful when we roll out market-place capabilities allowing our contestants to offer branding and marketing services to customers for a fee. Customers will be able to award work to individuals based upon the number and types of badges earned.