Can a Contest Help Your Freelancing Career?

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Credit: Yuri Arcurs on Photodune

As freelancers, our focus is almost always exclusively on getting paying work and getting it done. After all, it’s difficult to pay our bills or buy food with anything other than money. So investing time into a project that isn’t guaranteed to pan out doesn’t always seem to be the best investment of our time.

But there are some contests and challenges that can be worth a great deal to a freelancer if you win — provided you know exactly what you’re getting yourself into ahead of time.

The Benefits of Winning a Contest

When you’re considering whether to enter a contest, a competition or a challenge, there are several benefits that should be your deciding factors. When the benefits outweigh the time you have to take away from searching for new clients and paying work, then it is worth your while. Entry fees also have to be taken into consideration. Personally, I’ll only pay an entry fee for a contest if it’s based on work that I’ve already completed — but there are some challenges in every industry that make an entry fee worthwhile.

• Can you list ‘award-winning’ in your bio and have it mean something? There are many industry competitions that make winners stand out from among the crowd — at least to someone in the know. Such awards can provide a credential that is worth having. As an added bonus, many such competitions look at work you’ve already done, rather than requiring you to put together new work.
• Is the prize money definitely sweet? At a bare minimum, the pot should cover your time in entering a contest. Personally, I prefer to look for contests that at least triple what I’d generally be able to make if I was focused on freelancing. That’s because no one wins every contest they enter. You’ve got to make your entire contest strategy pay off — not just one entry.
• Are you going to be able to put the finished work in your portfolio? If your portfolio is in need of a little strengthening — maybe you’re refocusing your work into a new specialty or maybe you’re just getting out of school — challenges can be a way to create some out-of-the-ordinary portfolio pieces.

Challenges, Not Spec Work

I am absolutely not talking about spec work here. Spec work is, by definition, doing a project and only getting paid if the client likes your work. There are thousands of competitions along the line of ‘design our logo!’ and the end result is usually nothing but tears.

I’m not here to get into an argument about spec work — there are certain situations where the positives outweigh the negatives — but it is important to lay down the fact that spec work is very different from what I’m talking about. By definition, spec work is almost entirely focused on the money, not the prestige that comes from winning a contest, and you’ll often find that spec work contests offer minimal prizes.

There are several crowdsourcing startups that focus on connecting prospective clients with designers and other freelancers. Some of these companies fall more on the spec work end of the spectrum, while others focus on building more beneficial contests. While I’m not so interested in naming names, I’d personally note that if a crowdsourcing site essentially asks you to complete a project as you go up against other freelancers, with no guarantee of money, it’s spec work. If a crowdsourcing site, however, asks you to do a pitch or a few thumbnails and then ensures that you get paid for future stages of work, it’s a competition that can be much healthier for your freelancing work.

Photo credit: Some rights reserved by Yuri Arcurs.