“Ask the Translators” Contest Timeline

In the spirit of openness and to clarify any questions about who was responsible for what, we present the following timeline of the recently concluded contest. We also want to share why we conducted the contest the way we did.

• April 5, 2005. We know that the Translation Oversight Committee (TOC) meeting is forthcoming and that we want an outside blogger to interact somehow with members of the TOC. We bat around several ideas, but we aren’t sure what form that interaction will take.
• April 25, 2005. We finalize our plans. We decide to let a blogger submit ten questions for the TOC to answer during the meeting. At this point, we’re thinking that the TOC will provide written responses.
• May 16, 2005. We invite Adrian Warnock to ask the ten questions. We interacted with him during our Bible giveaway the previous month, so we know he has a passion for the ESV. We also know that he’ll submit some good questions. He’s free to come up with the questions however he wants; we don’t exercise any editorial control over them.
• May 16, 2005. Adrian announces news of our invitation on his blog and invites anyone to write to him and suggest questions.
• May 25, 2005. After reviewing the suggestions he received, Adrian posts the questions for the TOC.
• May 25, 2005. Adrian privately suggests holding a contest when he posts the answers–leaving a comment or trackback makes the commenter eligible to win a free ESV. We think it’s a great idea.
• May 25, 2005. We decide to film answers to the questions if time allows. We weren’t planning to film the answers; the high quality of the questions made us want to give a multimedia response.
• May 31 - June 4, 2005. The TOC meets.
• June 4, 2005. The TOC discusses the questions and films the answers.
• June 7-10, 2005. We edit and transcribe the raw video footage. We ended up with seventeen answers.
• June 9-10, 2005. We send the (mostly) completed videos and transcripts to Adrian so he can prepare responses to them.
• June 14, 2005. Adrian and we jointly announce the contest guidelines. We’ve decided to give away three Bibles–we’re expecting 200-300 comments, and we want each comment to have about a 1% chance of winning.
• June 15 - July 11, 2005. Every weekday during this time, Adrian posts the question and answer along with his commentary. We post the same question and answer (without additional commentary) a few hours after he does. We want to make sure that his readers have the first chance to read and watch the answers. We visit his site several times each day to keep up with all the comments everyone is making.
• July 12, 2005. We assign a number to every comment and trackback. People have made about 600 comments, so to keep the 1% chance of winning that we’re aiming for, we double the number of Bibles we’re giving away. We write a Perl program to randomly pick the winning comments.
• July 12, 2005. We inform the winners by email and ask Adrian if he’s interested in posting their names. (He is.) We follow suit after he’s posted them.
• July 12, 2005. We ask for feedback on how we could’ve conducted this contest better.
• July 15, 2005. We post this recap.

Philosophically, we made two crucial choices that (we think) contributed to the contest’s success:

First, we let someone else come up with the questions. We hoped for questions that would reflect what the blogosphere wanted to know about the ESV. It would’ve been painfully clear to readers if we’d tried to come up with the questions ourselves.

Second, we had someone else host the answers. Our goal here was twofold. First, we hoped for a discussion, which we would’ve had a hard time facilitating. We also wanted the dialogue to be free; we think that people are freer to voice their opinions on an independent site.

More importantly, though, we wanted to direct traffic to Adrian. They were his questions, so we thought that people should look to his site for the answers. We don’t feel that our site needs to be the nexus for every conversation about the ESV. Blogging encourages serendipitous interaction–we link to what we can, but we know that discussions about the ESV can and do occur without any prompting from us.

The contest wouldn’t have been such a success without Adrian’s willingness to host the discussion and keep it going. He bears most of the credit for how well it turned out.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 15th, 2005 at 10:16 am and is filed under General. Both comments and pings are currently closed.