BritMums Live: the goody bag comps

This weekend I enjoyed a marvellous time at BritMums Live, the UK’s biggest 2 day bloggers event. I met old friends, new friends, learned a lot of stuff about blogging and motherhood, laughed, cried and drank plenty of free wine. I even presented my own session on ‘The Dos and Don’ts of Blog Giveaways’, which I’m going to make available as a downloadable PDF on the blog in the next few days.

As we headed home from BML, we swapped our name badge for a goody bag – oh how I love a goody bag, especially one containing a bottle of wine!

As well as free gifts and vouchers, the goody bag contains a bunch of competitions. Yay!

Here’s my round up of what I found:

1. Joules

This is a lovely one. Not only do we have a free Joules scarf (RRP £34.95!), there’s a 15% discount code plus a photo competition to win one of five £50 vouchers. Get creative with your Joules gift, upload a photo to Instagram or Twitter with the hashtag #JoulesSelfie by 30th June 2014 – five winners picked at random. There’s a note on the card stating you can email for full T&Cs too.

My rating: 10/10 – free gift, discount code & creative comp with multiple prizes. The perfect bundle!

2. Pilot Pens

Here we have a nice pink pen as a freebie, tucked into a leaflet asking us to handwrite our blog name and tweet a photo with #HappyWritingBML for the chance of winning ‘Pilot Pen goodies’.

My rating: 8/10 – nice gift, and a lovely relevant idea for a photo competition – but what’s the prize, when’s the closing date and WHERE are the T&Cs? Tut tut, Pilot!

3. Beko

This one is an easy peasy postcard prize draw to win a Beko American style fridge-freezer – answer a question, complete your details, pop a stamp on and post to arrive by 31st August 2o14.

My rating: 5/10 – a bit boring, but a nice big prize. Again, no T&Cs whatsoever – not even a model number so you can check it’ll fit in your kitchen!

4. Caxton FX

I like this one! Win £500 on a Caxton currency card – blog about your holiday planning strategy and tweet with #holidayplannerMums before 4th July 2014. The promo postcard sends me to www.caxtonfx.com/planner to read the T&Cs but there’s no mention of whether the winner is chosen at random, or if every blog post is judged. I tweeted to ask, but no response yet!

My rating: 8/10 – Nice idea, nice prize. Not worth starting until you know if it’s judged though – it’ll be popular so will take a bit of originality and effort to win!

5. Good Enough Mums Club

The Good Enough Mums Club entertained us with extracts from the stage show on the Saturday evening at BritMums Live. It was excellent! In the goody bag we have a GEMC badge to wear with pride – if we tweet a photo of us sporting it with ‘Proud to be a #GoodEnoughMum!’ we can win tickets to the show and merchandise. I’d like to see plenty of bloggers entering this to support the girls!

My rating: 8/10 – A cute little badge and a fun photo comp  – prize details are fuzzy and there’s no closing date or T&Cs, but I’ll let them off as they’re new to the world of prize promotions. Yup – it’s Good Enough for me!

7. Spatone

Spatone had a fun photo competition running at the BritMums Live event, and in the bag we have a flyer for a blogger competition. Blog about Spatone, tweet a link with #KeepUpSpatone by 1st August 2014 and you could win one of three £200 gift vouchers for Spafinder Wellness. You can even email them at pr@nelsons.net for a free sample to try before you blog.

My rating: 7/10 – lots of information provided on the flyer and three prizes is generous, but T&Cs are limited (are the winners picked at random?)

8. Picota Cherries

Delicious Picota Cherries let me down. A lovely little competition flyer and fabulous prize – ‘Win a trip for two to the Jerte Valley’. It states there are T&Cs online at www.picota.co.uk/win/register-blog/ but I can’t find them. Write a blog post about Picota Cherries, the winner is the post with the most votes and announced on Friday 18th July 2014, so I presume it ends on the 17th.

My rating: 0/10 – it’s a voting competition and nobody likes them. ‘Nuff said.

9. Morrisons

This comp wasn’t actually in the goody bag, but a leaflet available in the Morrisons Lounge at the event. Create a summer meal for 4 using a minimum of three items from the Morrisons leaflet, then share the recipe, photo and price in a blog post before 31st July 2014 with the #MorrisonsMums or #MorrisonsDads hashtag. One winner gets an £80 weekly shop.

My rating: 3/10 – nice concept, but this is the type of blogger competition that gives brands a bad name – they’re only paying out a solitary £80 prize to one blogger, AND expecting them to go to Morrisons to buy the products too. The leaflet is also missing lots of detail from the T&Cs – ‘the judges’ decision is final’, but what is the criteria for judging? Come on Morrisons, you can do better than this!

I hope lots of my fellow BritMums bloggers will give these a go – and also hope they inspire you to run more fun creative and photo competitions on your own blogs. Keep on winning!