Another Contest Vivant - to WIN Reseach Money!!

Yes

You are probably right on average. Although potentially some might be late entrants.

BTW, when I have been talking about "no-hopers" generally in this thread, I mean groups that are don't have the potential to bring in big votes.

Yes, that is a concern.

Yes, whatever happens, it would be good for our sake if the Prader-Willi vote gets split.

It would be interesting to know when they registered. This has been running since April 25. 9,000 votes in that period might conceivably only be a few hundred voters and the 1257 in Canada could easily be less than 100 people. It would be interesting if anybody could look into it e.g. are there any Prader-Willi events? How big are the organisations? It seems a relatively rare disorder - 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 25,000.

But I'm very nervous about splitting the vote.

My heart belongs to Canada, but I must agree that our best chance for success in round 2 lies with WPI in the Pacific. I don't think we would be able to rally International support for the Canadian cause and we need to work together on this. Still, I do think we are pretty safe to be nominating more charities, at least so donations can be matched, especially in Canada, where it only would take 2 votes to get in the top 20 right now.

Apparently the Vivant Co was called APX last year. the winners were Prader-Willi overall, Canada - Alberta Association for Community Living, Pacific - Prader-Willi California Foundation , Mountain - Heart 2 Home Foundation, Central - Tapestries of Life, Eastern - CHERUBS. I didn't find vote counts- that would be so useful to know.

I am concerned that Pacific was won by Prader-Willi last year, but I looked at their FB page https://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/PWCF1 and it doesn't look that active.

In preparation for voting, I also sent an email to Vivant to ask if holding contests for votes was allowed. Hopefully I'll get a quiet reply, and we can make plans to do so if needed.

:Sign Good Job: Great work, Helen41. You're a very good "contester" (?).

I do think the WPI has the best chance of winning $100,000. Great if they could win $250,000. But I'm afraid some big organizations may hop in--or the well-organized, like we saw in CCG. The WPI is in the Pacific region along with LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, and Las Vegas (I think) nonprofits. So it seems to me it would be a good idea to get some other strong ME/CFS nonprofits into the top 20 of their respective regions. The CFIDS Assn. has gained some votes today, but is moving up slowly. I'm not sure why they haven't officially announced their participation. I think it would be hard for them to win $100,000 as there are so many big cities in the east with lots of nonprofits. (Is there a limit on the size of the nonprofits? I need to read the rules.) I'm not sure whether the Canadian ME/FM funds some research, but they might have the best shot of winning their region--if WPI should fall way behind and ME/CFS voters would support Canada. I think there needs to be a plan B in case bigger organizations start out-distancing the WPI. And the qualifying ME/CFS nonprofits can perhaps heavily promote donation drives during phase two to help get as much as possible in matching funds from Vivint.
I do think it is in WPI's favor that the voting is daily for a long period of time. They have great momentum and their voters will vote daily.
I saw that P.A.N.D.O.R.A. is in the running, but they don't have many votes yet. Too bad they are in the Eastern region.

Okay, I checked the rules. You probably know this, but the nonprofits must have an operating budget of less than $50 million. So the nonprofits in this contest can be huge!

I fear that this contest is going to be quite divisive.

I think there will be some unhappy charities, given that WPI was the clear leader in the Chase contest as well, and people may disagree about the best approach in the nomination round, but I suspect most would agree we all need to rally round WPI when it comes time to vote. It is the strongest candidate, and is situated in what appears to be one of the weaker regions.

I found my answer. Last year cherubs, who was one of the winners, posted this "You can enter a raffle ticket every time you vote for CHERUBS in the Eastern Division!
Win $1000 cash just for voting for CHERUBS in a FB contest to help raise money for critically ill babies born with CDH. CHERUBS is trying to win $100,000 for CDH research and family support."
I'm still hunting to find vote numbers

From Helen:
Last year cherubs, who was one of the winners, posted this "You can enter a raffle ticket every time you vote for CHERUBS in the Eastern Division!
Win $1000 cash just for voting for CHERUBS in a FB contest to help raise money for critically ill babies born with CDH. CHERUBS is trying to win $100,000 for CDH research and family support."

So maybe raffles are acceptable. Hmmm! But Vivint may not have known. I think someone here has written Vivint for clarification about this kind of incentive.

The goal in the contest is to get money. I think most CFIDS Assn. members supported WPI in the CCG contest. I really think that everyone can relate to (and take hope from) the idea that the WPI will provide research and clinical services. Everyone knows that costs a lot of money. This contest could be divisive, but I think most patients and organizations will support the WPI in the end.

:Sign Good Job: Interesting. That's quite a substantial prize that could influence voters. There could even be an argument that there is a difference between that sort of prize and a small prize. Anyway, useful precedent that could be quoted if the ME/CFS movement go down that route.

the big winner last year also gave a gift card weekly for votes. I would like to wait until we get a real answer from Vivant, and maybe we could set up a sweepstake thru Wildfire (a facebook contest app), and access people who are mainly interested in contests. If we gave an iPad2, or even 2, we could win big. It would require the involvement of WPI, but if we do this right, it would be a small investment for the potential of a big prize.
People who support us will do so anyway, they can enter through the contest or not, people who otherwise wouldn't vote, will enter and vote in the hope of winning. The other positive is that we have the opportunity to spread the word a bit on the contest page

Good idea i.e. we can get an idea of the number of supporters from the daily increase.

I agree we should wait for a definitive answer from Vivint. I'd be amazed if they would support this kind of thing - I consider it cheating. The idea of the contest is surely to give money to the charity that has the biggest level of community support for its goals, not the charity that dangles the biggest cash prizes in front of everybody on Facebook. I really do think that it is corrupt.

When I checked the figures yesterday, WPI had 1,660 and the other ME/CFS charities had 520, so about 25% of people were supporting these other charities. I don't think we can afford to lose 25% of the vote to other charities. I don't think that it's necessarily us who are currently directing that 25% either - there's a worldwide community of PWC and many of them will probably support their local charity if they see it up there.

Maybe I am just pessimistic...

I agree that it doesn't seem in the spirit of supporting a charity, but if the sponsor thinks it's ok, and 2 out of the 2 groups I looked at did it last year, we will miss out if we don't join in. I'm willing to hold my nose if it helps our cause!

I agree - I'd be willing to hold my nose alongside you if Vivint approve it! :innocent1:

Apologies if the link was posted before (I don't always follow links):

I've been hunting, trying to find vote numbers from last year. I can't find any numbers for Pacific, but the winner of Central was averaging 290 votes/day, and the overall winner had 30,000 votes a couple of days before the end, for an average of 500 votes a day.
That's a lot of votes, but certainly not an impossible number of votes

As has maybe been said, I think the trick here is to get people signed up to an "event" on Facebook where they get a daily reminder E-mailed out. Of course other votes would be useful too but it would be good to get a core chunk that way. 263 people signed up to the event already: http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=121179681298558 and there hasn't been really a push to sign people up (which I think is a good strategy - I don't think that should be done until the nominations are closed).

ETA: the events still exist for CCG so the people who signed up for them could be contacted (I would hope - not sure how the system works - I know individuals can't always contact other individuals on Facebook).

I think these groups that won last year have a leg up on us strategy wise. Prader-Willi looks as if it could dominate. I wonder if they all voted for one PW region until it was clearly in the lead and then started on a second region?

I know this is risky, but I'd like to see us all vote for WPI until it's way in the lead and then shift to the second most likely to win it's region. However, in the very first 24 hours of the contest, we will know what we are up against. At some point we may have to shift from the pacific region to another if it looks like we can't overcome the competition.

I've ask Cort if there might be a way to have a place on the home page that just outlines our current strategy, so that it can be updated throughout the contest, and people don't have to read through long threads. I sure hope that feelings don't get hurt and we can all just use our votes to maximize our chances of winning money for CFS rather than for our personal favorites.

Maybe in order to minimize hurt feelings, we can take a poll with a couple strategies and we can vote on it and then all agree to stick with the winner?

I'd be extremely worried about voting WPI until it's a long way in the lead and then switching - in such a long voting period (11 weeks), another group could easily come out of nowhere. It just needs one person with a big, organised network or some sort of event in a mall with a laptop and there could be thousands of extra votes for our opponent.

If WPI is getting thrashed in the early stages, the same is also true of what we could do - we might be able to pick up support along the way and get back into play. I can't see any other ME/CFS organisation getting the same level of support as WPI.

Again, I don't think that Phoenix Rising can control voting on this - I've started a poll asking who is voting and about six people have responded! I hope a lot more are voting than are doing the poll but I think that most of the voting activity is going to be beyond our control.

I think it's good to talk this through, though - speaking for myself I am not at all hurt by hearing about yours and other people's ideas and suggestions on this and we've have a really useful exchange of information that is helping us think through the possibilities. I think it is wise, not hurtful, to have the kind of constructive discussion that you're taking part in and encouraging, SpecialK.

I have the sense that most people would want to back WPI in Phase 2, at least until they appear safe or appear doomed (I'd back any research group, personally, it's just that I think WPI have the most potential to win the whole contest for us and hence maximise our money). I wonder if it would be best to postpone discussion until we are maybe a week into voting so that we can see how things are going so that we at least have some sort of ballpark notion of where things are headed?

If we do see the need to change strategies I agree it would be a good idea to have an updatable home page.

If it wasn't regional it would be so much simpler!