The contest entry form is the easy part. The hard part arrives six weeks later, on the weekend the judging is supposed to happen, when three hundred entries turn out to be a spreadsheet of names next to links, a shared folder with forty files called IMG_4471, and no record of who agreed that their photograph could appear on the website.
A contest entry form has an unusual job. Most forms only have to collect something. This one has to collect something that a panel of people will compare against two hundred others, weeks after it arrived, possibly without knowing whose it is. That requirement reaches all the way back into the field list. This is a guide to building the intake so the judging is a judging session rather than a salvage operation.
First decide whether it is judged or drawn
This sounds obvious and it changes almost every other decision, so it is worth stating.
A judged contest picks winners on merit. Entries need to be comparable, which means a fixed format, a category, and enough consistency that two judges scoring the same entry reach roughly the same number. Multiple entries from one person are often fine, sometimes encouraged, and the entry itself is the thing being assessed.
A prize drawn at random has no merit component. The entry is just a ticket, entries need to be unique per person, and the main design problem is stopping one person entering forty times. Completely different form, completely different controls.
The awkward cases are the ones in the middle, usually a public vote followed by a judge's decision, or a random draw among everyone who met a quality bar. Decide which half governs, because a form built for one does the other badly. The rest of this is about the judged kind.
The entry itself: formats, files and links
Whatever is being submitted, the format has to be specified on the form and not in a separate rules document.
State the acceptable formats and the maximum size next to the upload field. For images, name the file types and a minimum resolution if the winners will be printed. For writing, name the word count range and whether a PDF or a plain document is wanted. For video, name the length limit and the platforms accepted if links are allowed. Every format left unstated arrives in the one format that will not open.
Decide between uploads and links, and know what each costs. An upload is simpler for the entrant and puts the file in a place under the organiser's control. A link to a video or portfolio site is easier for large files and depends on the entrant not deleting or restricting it before judging. Where the file is the entry, an upload is safer, and where the work is already published somewhere, a link with a required check that it is publicly viewable is reasonable.
There is one specific trap with the free options. Google Forms can take a file upload, and Google's documentation states that to answer a file upload question, responders need to sign in to a Google Account. For a public contest that is a real barrier: entrants without an account cannot submit at all, and some will simply give up rather than create one. It also means a contest aimed at the general public quietly filters for people with a Google account, which is not the entrant pool most organisers think they are getting.
Ask for the title of the work as a separate field. Not embedded in the filename, not in a description box. The title appears on the shortlist, in the announcement, and on any display of the winners, and retyping three hundred of them from filenames is a day of work nobody plans for.
Eligibility, and the rules that decide disputes
Contest disputes almost never concern the quality of the judging. They concern whether an entry should have been accepted at all. That makes the eligibility fields the most valuable part of the form.
Age. If there are junior categories, or if entrants under a certain age need a parent's consent, ask for date of birth rather than a checkbox saying the entrant is old enough. A stored date supports the category assignment and can be checked later. A ticked box cannot.
Where the entrant is. Many contests are limited by country or region, for shipping reasons or legal ones. Ask for the country as a required field even when the contest is local, because entries arrive from outside the intended area every time.
Who is excluded. Staff, contractors, judges and their immediate families are the usual exclusions. Say it on the form and ask for a declaration, because this is the exclusion most often discovered after a winner is announced.
Originality and prior publication. Whether the work must be original to the entrant, whether it can have been published before, and whether it can have been entered in another contest. These are three separate questions and each one needs its own checkbox rather than a single agreement to unseen terms.
The deadline, with a time and a time zone. A closing date without a time produces entries at three in the morning that somebody has to make a decision about. State the hour and the zone, and if the form can close itself on a schedule, let it, so the cutoff does not depend on somebody remembering.
Rights: what may be done with the entry
This is the field that gets skipped and cannot be added afterwards.
Entrants own what they submit. The organiser needs specific permission to do specific things: display shortlisted entries, publish winners on a website, print them in a programme, use them in next year's promotion, keep them in an archive. Each of those is a different permission, and asking for all of them in one line labelled as agreement to the terms is both weaker and less honest than asking plainly.
Three practical points.
Show the wording on the form, not behind a link. The entrant should have seen the text they agreed to. A required checkbox beneath visible wording is the standard shape.
Store the wording as it stood on the day. If the terms are edited mid contest, entries made before the edit agreed to the previous version. A record that says only "terms: accepted" cannot tell anyone which version was accepted, and that is precisely the question that gets asked when an image is reused a year later.
Ask how the entrant wants to be credited. The name they want printed is often not their legal name, and collecting it at entry is a minute of work now instead of three hundred emails in the week of the announcement.
What rights wording is enforceable, and whether a contest needs published rules at all, depends on the jurisdiction and sometimes on the prize value. That question belongs with whoever gives the organisation legal advice, and the useful thing to bring them is the exact wording and the exact mechanism, before entries open rather than after.
Building the intake so judging is possible
Judging happens weeks later, often by people who had nothing to do with the intake. Four structural decisions make that session work.
A category on every entry, chosen by the entrant. Judges work one category at a time. Categories assigned afterwards by the organiser are a guess and a data entry job.
An entry number generated on submission. Judges refer to entries by number, scores come back by number, and the shortlist is a list of numbers until the moment it is not.
Separation of the work from the entrant's identity. Many contests judge blind, and blind judging is impossible if the entrant's name is in the filename and the description. Keeping the identity fields separate from the submitted work in the record is what makes it possible to show judges one and not the other.
A status and an owner per entry. Received, eligible, ineligible, shortlisted, not shortlisted, winner. Plus somebody responsible for chasing the entry that arrived with a corrupted file. An entry list where every row carries its own state is the difference between a shortlist that can be produced in an hour and one that has to be reconstructed from an email thread.
Scores themselves are usually better kept separate from the entry record, since several judges score the same entry and each needs their own row. What belongs on the entry is the outcome.
Where the entry list should live
| Approach | Good at | Where it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| A free form plus a spreadsheet and a shared folder | No cost, set up in an afternoon | Files separated from their entries, no status per entry, uploads require entrants to sign in to a Google Account, rights wording not versioned |
| A contest or awards platform | Built for judging: rounds, panels, scoring rubrics, public voting, entry fees | Priced for a formal programme, and the entry archive lives inside that platform |
| A form tool with response management | Entry, files, status and replies to entrants in one list | Scoring rubrics and public voting have to be arranged separately |
For a first year contest with a few hundred entries and a panel of three, the deciding question is usually whether the files stay attached to their entries and whether the replies to entrants can be sent from the same place. That is where the free combination costs the most time. For a contest with paid entry, several rounds and a public vote, a dedicated platform is doing real work.
Pricing models are worth reading closely before the shortlist gets short, since a contest is spiky by nature: pricing that counts responses and pricing that counts the few people running the contest behave very differently when two hundred entries arrive in the final twelve hours. The use cases that behave like a contest, from applications to event signups, all share the same shape of take it in, judge it, answer it.
The last thing the entry list has to produce is the replies. Every entrant should hear something: shortlisted, not this time, and here is where the winners are. That round of email is what determines whether there are entries next year, and it is a filter on a well kept list or a week of work on a badly kept one.
What to change first
Put the rights wording on the form in full, with a visible checkbox and the version stored against each entry, because that is the only part that cannot be fixed after entries close. Then add a category field and an entry number so the judging session can start with a sort rather than a rebuild. If the entries, the files and the correspondence currently live in three places, see what one entry list looks like end to end before the contest opens.
Q1. What should a contest entry form ask for?
Entrant name, contact email, the name they want credited under, country, date of birth where there are age rules, the entry category, the work itself or a link to it, the title of the work, and separate agreements for originality and for the right to publish. Anything beyond that should be optional, since every extra required field costs entries.
Q2. Can Google Forms be used for a contest that needs file uploads?
It can take uploads, but Google's documentation states that responders need to sign in to a Google Account to answer a file upload question. For a contest open to the public that excludes anyone without an account, so either accept links instead or use a form tool that takes files without an account.
Q3. How do you run blind judging?
Keep the entrant's identity in separate fields from the submitted work, ask entrants not to put their name in the file or the description, and give every entry a number on submission. Judges then see the work and the number, and the identity is only rejoined to it when the results are settled.
Q4. Who owns the entries after the contest?
The entrant owns their work, and the organiser only gets the permissions the entrant actually granted. Ask for each use separately, display, publish, print and reuse in future promotion, show the wording on the form rather than behind a link, and store which version of the wording each entry agreed to.
Q5. Should there be a limit on entries per person?
For a judged contest a limit is optional and often unnecessary, since the entry is being assessed on merit rather than counted. A cap of two or three per category is common where judging time is the constraint, and it should be stated on the form so nobody submits a fourth and has it discarded without warning.
Q6. What is the most common reason a contest entry gets disqualified?
Not the quality of the work but the eligibility rules: the entrant is outside the permitted region, is related to a judge or works for the organiser, the work was published before, or it arrived after the stated closing time. Asking each of those as its own field at entry is what allows the check to happen before judging rather than after an announcement.