Please Check Your Rose & Bay Eligibility

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Now that we have the category handlers listed for the advance planning of the 2011 Rose & Bay Awards, I'd like to remind all you folks out there to check your eligibility.   You don't need to answer the questions in a comment, but you should know the answers for your own pursuits and you might want to share them with your audience.

Patrons: What project(s) did you support financially during 2010?  Did you miss any that you wanted to support?  If you haven't contributed at all, there is still time to chip in a bit to your favorite project(s) and qualify yourself for nomination in this category.  Should you choose to promote your participation, a good way is to make a post listing and linking whatever project(s) you supported; then people will know you're a patron of the crowdfunded arts and what project(s) you like enough to pay for.

Creators: What project(s) did you start or continue during 2010?  How well did that work out for you?  Jot down some notes.  Ideally, for each project, you should be able to specify:

• the project's name
• its landing page, home page, introduction, or other anchor
• any tag(s) that would help interested viewers (nominators! voters!) find more of it
• its mode(s) of audience interaction such as polls or prompts
• its crowdfunding payment method(s) such as a donation button or subscription service

These features help people identify a project as cyberfunded creativity, quickly and clearly.  Are you missing any of those?  You still have time to fill the gap; it's not January yet.  Not all of these are required for the award eligibility, but they definitely help with clarity.  Complete award rules appear on the 2011 Rose & Bay Awards landing page.

For more detailed coverage on project clarity, see my article "5 Steps to Crowdfunding Success."  I wrote it last year while driving myself batty trying to figure out which of the many projects I enjoyed would actually qualify for nomination.  This year I'm hoping to make things easier for the folks nominating and voting on projects, so I'm encouraging creators to do a little prep work. 

After you've checked for clarity, compare your project(s) to the categories.  These are the 2011 categories:

• Art: Visual materials such as pictures or icons.
• Fiction: Imaginative storytelling in text.
• Poetry: Anything in text verse, including free verse.  (Keep an eye on prose poetry vs. flash fiction.)
• Webcomic: An online combination of text and images; may be single-panel, strip, full-page, or whatever.
• Other Project: Anything that is not Art, Fiction, or Poetry (movies, music, etc.); plus projects that combine two or more of those. 
• Patron: A person who donates to, buys from, or otherwise financially supports any cyberfunded creativity project(s).

Should you wish to promote yourself as a creator of crowdfunded goodness, a good way to do that is to list your project(s) with basic details plus category, so people will know what is eligible for nomination/voting in 2011.  If you're not sure which category fits your project(s), just ask.

Thank you all for your attention.  I hope you're looking forward to the Rose & Bay Awards!