Calling all young dancers in Ontario! Get ready to show UGOT DANCE Canada your best moves. UGOT DANCE has launched a video contest through WizeHive to find their next star.

Interested participants are asked to record themselves and go to www.ugotdance.com to upload the video with some help from their parents or school supervisors. Entries are open until June 1, 2012. Children ages 4 through 14, anywhere in Ontario are allowed to enter. There are two categories, one for individuals and one for school groups.

UGOT DANCE is on a mission to get children active and they hope this dance contest will help. Producing the video entry can be a fun family project. Children will create and perform their own dances while family members will do the filming and editing.  Winners, as determined by popular vote, will each receive a prize package including a guest spot on the UGOT DANCE Web TV Award Show and free dance classes for their school (up to $750 value), amongst other prizes.  This a great opportunity for children to showcase their dance talent, and to get families and schools to support them.

UGOT DANCE is part of the UGOT Education Group.  UGOT is a socially progressive organization founded in January 2008 to provide children and youth with enrichment programs designed to encourage and promote physical activity, healthy living, creativity and intellectual advancement. UGOT DANCE is the first of the company’s programs with additional programs in development including UGOT MAGIC and UGOT NATURE.

Three winning teams will compete in the Global Finals for a chance to have their solution implemented at Habitat for Humanity, Solar Aid or One Laptop per Child through a US$1 million grant

The Hult Global Challenge (Hult GCC) invites college and university students from around the world to solve the world’s most pressing social challenges. Through a strategic partnership with the Clinton Global Initiative, the Hult GCC has committed to working with fellow CGI commitment makers on solving real-world social challenges.

From now until February 25, online entries are open for teams of students from around the world. Voting for the online competition takes place between February 25 and March 9, with plenty of time before the Global Finals on April 26.

Speakers and guests for the Global Finals include President Bill Clinton and Dr. Muhammad Yunus. The event is an opportunity for participants to connect and learn from global business leaders. Participants also have the chance to meet like-minded change-makers, forging opportunities to collaborate on future projects.

Last year’s case studies were based on the challenge of providing clean water in partnership with Water.org, founded by Gary White and Matt Damon. While only one winner from each track will be selected, it is only the start for innovative ideas. Regional winners from Boston were so passionate about the team’s pilot idea last year, they went on to pitch the idea to venture capitalists and found additional funding for their project.

Check out their video for a more in depth explanation of the Hult Global Case Challenge.

Here are a few contests running right now that we can’t get enough of:

Freescale’s Smart Pundit 2012 Contest – Who do you follow to keep up with smart device news? Freescale has a list of 20 and they’d like your help picking the ultimate five. Go ahead, tell them who you think knows and shares the most about smart device news!

Foxy’s Winter Vegetable Recipe Contest – A lucky winner will receive a Kindle Fire each week for the four weeks of February. Entrants are encouraged to share their favorite winter vegetable recipe. We look at this as a contest where everyone wins, as we can’t wait to read all the recipes.

Revelation Massage’s Valentine’s Day Contest – If you are in the Lewiston/Auburn area of Maine, you can vote on the inspiring stories in a contest celebrating Love. Entrants have a chance to win massages, chocolates, wine, several dinners and overnight stays in local hotels. We love reading the stories posted for each entry!

We’re just about half way through the winter with only a light dusting of snow. Since we’re not out on the slopes, we’ve had time to make some more updates.   Over the last four weeks, many of these updates were behind the scenes focused on performance, but there are a handful of helpful ones on the front end too.   Here is a review of some of the more significant changes:

When WizeHive is used to deploy an online application, the application requests an email address as a login ID and a password.   By default we confirm the password and if someone forgets the password it’s easy enough to reset it.  But if someone makes a typo entering their user id we have no easy way for our client administer to help them out.  Inevitably, 3 to 5 people out of 2000 applications make a typo while entering their email.    So we now have a setting that allows our login screen to request a confirmation of the email address.   This way, even if someone types in their ID/email once; the system will catch it unless they type it into both fields incorrectly.    While we have this as a setting you can turn on or off, we will highly recommend to our customers to leave it on.

Most customers use our “Actions” app to email groups of people, copy data, move data, and print in bulk.   This release includes a refresh of the look and feel of this page.   As shown in the picture below, the whole screen has received a face lift, including how we list out the field that you can embed/merge into your email:

Next up are some upgrades to our form builder.    In our prior release we added the ability to copy and paste a group of fields multiple times into a form by highlighting them and dragging the group into a new place on the form.   This release, we’ve changed the paste function so it automatically names the new field similar to the old one (that was copied from) but increments a number after it.  So Project Name would become Project Name 2, etc. as fields are pasted in.

We’ve also added an interface to a feature previously only available to implementation people, which is the ability to hide a field from limited users.  If you build a form and want to have judges, board members or anyone else log into a portal to rate and review applications, you can easily hide sensitive data fields like a social security number or financial data when viewed through the portal.

Students are now able to submit applications for the 2012 Fellows Class of New York Needs You.

New York Needs You (NYNY) aims to level the playing field for first-generation and low-income college students in New York City.  NYNY closes the opportunity gap through its intensive career development and leadership training Fellowship that enables high-potential, first-generation college students to realize their college and career aspirations.

NYNY’s intensive 2-year Fellowship program includes bi-weekly career workshops where Fellows develop relationships with more than 200 highly accomplished Mentor Coaches and engage with community and business leaders. In addition to working one-on-one with a Mentor Coach for a total of 800 hours over 2 years, Fellows also receive a $2,500 professional development grant, access to 2 summer internships at prestigious companies and organizations, free business attire, free writing and ESL support, subsidized test preparation services, and discounted laptops and tablet computers.

This program is a huge opportunity aimed at students who are the first in their families to attend college and are from low–income backgrounds.

Online Facebook Contest Grand Prize: Free School or Library Visit by Jan Brett to Anywhere in the World,
Entries now open until April 9, 2012.

New York Times #1 bestselling and beloved children’s author/ artist, Jan Brett, launched her second annual Facebook contest through Wizehive’s Online Contest Manager. The online contest encourages parents, teachers, and librarians to enter to win a school or library visit from Brett during the 2012-2013 school year.

Within an hour of opening, the contest had accrued hundreds of entries. Tens of thousands of entries are expected by the time the contest ends on April 9, 2012.

With over 37 million books in print, Jan Brett knows how to engage her audience. Here’s why we think Jan Brett is running a great contest:

• She is running her contest on Facebook, with a built in audience of almost 33,000 fans.
• She makes it easy for new fans to enter.
• She is offering up a prize that is meaningful to her audience.
• She has a great PR firm to help promote the contest.
• She is limiting entries to one per person, but encouraging fans to recruit friends and family to vote.

The most important rule followed in making this contest a success is remembering that running a contest isn’t just about gaining Facebook Fans, but rather giving your audience something they really want.

Don’t know who Jan Brett is? Your children will.

With over 37 million books in print, Jan Brett is one of America’s most popular children’s book artist/ authors and has brought to life lovable characters and imaginary backdrops for millions of children for more than 30 years.  Her popularity among preschool and elementary school youngsters, their teachers, and parents is unmatched.

While Brett is most known for her children’s books, she is also an award-winning breeder of ornamental fowl (fancy chickens!).  Some of her best book ideas come from other interests including extensive travel, marathon training (she is a seven-time Boston Marathon runner benefitting the MS Society), and being a member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Board of Trustees.

Jan Brett lives in Norwell, MA.

In honor of the 100th anniversary of their Japanese Garden, Maymont is hosting a photo contest.

People are invited to submit their best photo of the garden, no matter what time of year, or how old the photo is. We expect this will lead to a group of amazing photos for Maymont. Prizes for the contest include an iPad, a portrait session, one-year Maymont memberships and several gift cards.

Photos will go through a judging round, as well as a voting round to determine a winner. We are looking forward to seeing all of the entries and feel inspired to visit Richmond, Virginia now!

We’re ready to ring in 2012, but before we put on our party hats, we wanted to share with you what we’ve changed in the last two weeks. We’re pretty proud of all we’ve accomplished this year and look forward to working with everyone next year as well.

Administrator Access

First, a small but useful upgrade that will help everyone is the ability to designate whether an invited user is going to be an administrator right at the time of the invitation process.   This will take what is currently three steps (invite, acceptance, change of status) and change it into one:

Modify WizeApps

Second, when you build a form or WizeApp in WizeHive you typically have to go through 3 steps to modify the app.   You have to click on the gears icon, then scroll through the list, then finally click on the edit feature.    We now have a “Modify App” button on each Custom App which takes you directly to editing the app.

Form Builder Upgrade

Another new and very powerful feature is an upgrade to our form builder.   Sometimes, you need to repeat a group of fields when building a form.  For instance, you may have a group of address fields (address, city, state, zip) that you need to reuse 3 or 4 times.    We now have the ability to let you choose a group of fields and quickly copy them and paste them elsewhere onto the form.

Simply (1) pick the fields (2) they will appear on the right side, then (3) drop the box to the place you went them to go to paste them in.

Letters of Recommendation

Finally, we have also streamlined the process for deploying our letter of recommendation.    With our letters of recommendation you always had the choice of whether the letters were initiated by the students/applicants or by the administrator running the process.   However, this choice was not available as a front end option (we would have to enable it for you).   In addition, information to configure the letter of recommendation process was split into two different places within WizeHive.   Now it is all available from the settings areas of the recommendation app:

Panic moment: Your contest went live yesterday and you don’t have any entries yet. What do you do?

First, don’t feel like it’s too late. While it is more relaxing to have a marketing campaign ready to go before you launch, you can get results within a few hours.

Take a few minutes thinking about where your target audience spends time online. For example, are you trying to attract sports enthusiasts? Are there websites that list up-to-date scores or give daily tips on how to improve skills? Come up with a list of five to ten websites to contact about advertising. If you’re lucky, a few might have room for immediate ad placements. If not, inquire about the possibility of sponsoring a blog post. This is usually more expensive, but for good reason, a blog post influences readers more than an ad on the same site.

Don’t forget about social networks. Facebook will approve creative for ads within 24 hours. Spend some time making sure your ads are laser focused. Facebook will tell you the potential reach of your ad as you are refining it. You narrow each audience down by location, interests, education, or age. If you want to advertise to people interested in a specific sport, you can do that. These targeted ads are quick to deploy and effective.

We like to think that WizeHive gives you the tools to make building and managing your contest easy, so you can focus on what you do best, inspiring people to love your product, brand or organization. We hope these last minute marketing tips help you out!

Photo by: Shoes on Wires

These past few weeks, we’ve been working hard on behind the scenes improvements. While you’ll likely notice a few improvements to your WizeHive experience, most of the changes this update are behind the scenes.    There are a few goodies, though, that we hope you’ll enjoy as an early holiday treat:

• You may now toggle on many more features when using the HTML field in the form builder.  In addition to font size you now have control over colors and a number of other properties.
• We have tightened up the line spacing within our task manager so you can see more tasks in the same amount of space.
• On our self serve contests, when the entry period has ended, the Enter tab will now disappear.
• On our self serve contests, the “View Entries” tab will switch to “Vote” when appropriate.
• We have upgraded the look and feel of the facebook and/or wizehive login screen when voting login is turned on

In addition, we’ve refined and wanted to share an option that not too many of our WizeHive users even know exist which is available when you search for information from within WizeHive.

Normally, when you search for anything in a workspace you’ll see the results show up in a listing to the side of the page list, with one line for each match.    Did you know that you can enable a feature that turns on a “See Details” link next to each item, which when clicked will show related field information for each item? It’s true!   When you search on anything, you can show details for the information that is most important to you.

Here’s how:

• Go to the reports tab for your workspace
• If you already have a report named *search results, click the edit button
• If you do not, click Add View, then create a new view and call it: “search results
• Edit the report to include the fields you’d like to see and save.

Once you save the report and then do a search you will now see a link that says “See Details” next to the search and if you click  on it a box will open showing you more information about that item.