Sure, I can answer this! We use the money for a variety of things:1. 25 ribbons, CD-ROMs, the packaging to mail them, and the postage itself... costs money. It costs even more to send stuff to Brazil and Ukrane. At 70 entries, it barely breaks even.
2. Website hosting. The contest uses a boatload of bandwidth, far more than the AGA site itself. And your entry STAYS on the website indefinitely. We've still got the 2000 contest results up there, and intend to keep it! This costs money as well. The entry fees help pay for this.
3. Special unforseen circumstances. Last year we had Mr. Amano as a judge, and probably will again in a future year. Mr. Amano did not wish to judge the entries on the Internet, but insisted on photographs. Well, *WE* think that it's better to see the entries "our" way, with five photographs and reasonable size, instead of one 4x6" print, so I spent a bit of effort creating glossy inkjet-printed landscape letter pages with all five photos collaged (with the main one splashed across 10" wide!). It cost us about $150 to print and mail this to Japan.
These aren't reasons necessarily why we charge money, but they're kinda relevant:
4. The contest is open to non-AGA members. We don't bug people to join. 5. The entry fee is pitifully small.6. If you can't pay the entry fee (either by hardship, or because PayPal won't talk to your country), there are a dozen volunteers willing to pay the fee for you.
7. Not a cent of this goes to the hours spent on preparing the site, programming, creating graphics, PR work, scanning and hand-typing the ones that came in through the mail, correcting mistakes, cropping photos, retyping plant names, etc etc.
- Erik On Sat, 17 Sep 2005, Cheryl Rogers wrote:
ScottMorris on The Planted Tank forum wants to know why you have to pay to enter our contest. I think that's a fair question, but no one has answered. I will be happy to answer, but I don't know what to tell him.Cheryl _______________________________________________ AGA-mcm mailing list AGA-mcm@thekrib.com http://lists.thekrib.com/mailman/listinfo/aga-mcm
-- Erik Olson erik at thekrib dot com _______________________________________________ AGA-mcm mailing list AGA-mcm@thekrib.com http://lists.thekrib.com/mailman/listinfo/aga-mcm