ABPA - Australian Bush Poets Association

With the new Australia Post postage fees and delivery times just released, now more than ever Poetry Competition organizers need to look at updating how their competitons are run. With mail now taking up to 6 days to be delivered by snail mail it makes no sense at all to continue to use this avenue as a means of submitting work to competitions.

Upgrading to enable people to lodge their work on line and to pay by pay pal or direct deposit into the organizations bank account has never made more sense. It would also IMO probably increase the number of entries they receive into comps as poets could lodge entries up to midnight on the cut off date - and not having to pay the extra postage and or money order charges to enter would also make it more appealing.

Timely comment Mausie.

North Pine are working on their new web-site (should be fully operational in early Feb), a couple of things in their 'Social Media Strategy' are, 1. Electronic Submissions (for written comps) this just makes it easier for the organisers and treasurer. 2. Electronic payments. 3. Digital submissions for video clips etc.

North Pine have a specific strategy to utilise Social Media via their web-site, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and You Tube ...

Watch this space ...

I absolutely agree with you Maureen. While most competitions do say "postmarked by" the closing date, some do say "received no later than", which can be an issue if you are wanting to send something at the last minute.

Then, if a competition requests three copies of your poem, it's very easy to run over the standard letter size by the time you include entry form, cheque, maybe SSAE for results or judge's critique, or other paperwork.

Electronic submission really makes sense and would surely also have an advantage for judges, if they were remote from the competition location and able to have the entries forwarded to them electronically.

Good on North Pine, Manny! Let's keep up!

Regards
Shelley

Great to know that North Pine are picking that up and running with Manny

Excellent suggestion, Maureen, although I suspect the take-up will be slow. On-line payment is a good first step, and submitting entries as email attachments is quite straightforward. (There are more sophisticated submission options, but they require quite elaborate development.) There are logistical problems to be sorted out at the judging end. I've judged a comp in which everything was done electronically, but the judges were still given hard copies of the poems. That requires somebody taking the time to print them all out, which adds to an organiser's workload, especially with multiple judges. It's also worth pointing out that, from my experience as an entrant, on-line submissions can take just as long (or longer!) to organise as snail-mail.

Forwarding entries by email to judges assumes they have internet access (at least one ABPA judge doesn't). It also assumes that the computer on the receiving end is working reliably, and not susceptible to conniption fits! Care needs to be taken to ensure that poems are correctly recorded against the writer's name by the organiser while not inadvertently attaching that name to the poem that is emailed to judges. It's all quite manageable, but given some of the strange things that happen with paper entries, there are bound to be lots of tricky lessons to learn with electronic submissions.

Cheers
David