cool

The r/nba meet up and All-Star event was super exciting and fun, and hopefully just the start of many more events and collaborations with the Community Funds team! If you are thinking about trying to run an event, I'd highly encourage you to submit a proposal! Honestly a great experience and a great way to bring your community together.

Creator and mod of /r/FreeGameFindings who just recently worked on an art contest with the Reddit Community Funds program. It was an extremely fun experience and aligned with our group's special giveaway posts I have worked on for years. The philosophy for my use of the communal funding was to buy game codes to give to the winners of the contest. Doing so required me purchasing copies of games that would redeem in the proper regions, as well as some other hiccups like purchasing numerous copies of the same game(s), which needed to be cleared from the vendors.

I had a wonderful time planning the event and working on it. There were complications making purchases on the three websites I was using for my game acquisition, but thankfully they were all resolvable. Wound up with some abnormalities during a lot of my purchases that kept stating the payment method was an issue, when in reality it was never the case and I was just being blocked on those sites. Part of me theorized that it could be due to me being in Canada making purchases. Was a bummer since I had gone the extra mile to clear any issues up as much as possible before even starting, but it ultimately worked out. Poor /u/AsteriskRX got a good few emails about the confusion there, not to mention all the receipts I sent them. Thank you so much for the help with it all!

Overall, it was a slightly stressful event due to issues out of mine and /u/AsteriskRX's controls, but it worked out great. Was a great opportunity and the community overall loved it.

If I were to provide any possible feedback or request for future events like this, it would be for contests and sweepstakes to be allowed for more regions, but I understand that it can be a difficult thing legally. Hopefully there is a means of opening it further though. Regardless it was a tremendous event and I was happy to work with you guys on it!

r/SMARTRecovery mod here, we had a great time with our Community Funds project! The funds enabled us to give away SMART Recovery handbooks to members looking to learn evidence-based tools for addiction recovery, as well as trainings for members with 6+ months continuous sobriety who wanted to lead their own peer support recovery meetings. Thank you again for helping us to serve our community in this way.

Mod of r/AustralianSpiders here. What a great initiative the Community Funds program is! Our sub ticked over 20k members and we wanted to give something back to our community so we decided to host a photography competition. We had heaps of entries all the way from smartphones to professional DSLR macro setups and we got to see some really incredible photography of Australia's notorious Arachnids! The image posted in the post above is actually taken with a smartphone that has a clip on macro attachment! It's incredible what is possible without spending big on gear!

The community funds process was simple, all we needed to do was detail out a written plan (on a provided template) of how we intended on announcing the contest, selecting winners and distributing prizes. It was a little daunting at first, but the community funds team were communicative and supportive even through the time zone difference between USA and AUS. They helped generate the terms and conditions wiki page and to broadcast our announcements to the community. We had somebody to troubleshoot for us at every step of the way and we were able to use external resources (Discord and Google Sheets) to manually track our entries and engage with our celebrity judges. The only feedback I have is to really make sure your vendors can accept the payment method. Making purchases online with a digital copy of a mastercard is great, but i didnt realise that my local post office wouldn't have a way of handling the payment. This was absolutely not a deal breaker however, but just a heads up to check with physical vendors/stores that they can accept the card.

The whole project was a resounding success. Our winners received their prize packs and each posted a big thank you to the sub and it's community. We fully intend on running similar projects in the future with the help of these great initiatives and I would absolutely recommend them to any sub that is preparing to celebrate a milestone or just wants to engage with their community in a fun and creative way.

10/10 would recommend.

Mod of /r/NintendoSwitch checking in. Firstly, thank you for this opportunity /u/infinitebroth and the rest of the team. I wanted to voice some questions for Reddit Meetup Week. We are very very interested in making a community in-person tournament and large scale gamenight for around 100 to 250 redditors -- and depending on the venue also streamed online to the rest of the sub! The thing we are considering is while the form says $50,000 is the top cap (which we are not anywhere close to), our estimate for a gaming venue in the few cities we believe we can make it work put us closer to the ballpark range of $10,000 to $20,000 total cost (depending on individual venue, food, any rentals, etc).

We have a few places in US east coast cities in-mind, but we don't know what is a "reasonable" ceiling for this particular meetup (renting out a venue for a night) might be for meetup approval. A few concerns which would help planning and making a decision about a venue prior to us submitting our application later this week:

• Our mod team is fairly spread out, not more than ~1 in any given part of the US we are looking at; can these funds pay for economy airfare and hotel stays for a small handful of non-local mods to come and help coordinate?
• We have the idea to run a raffle (not finalized) where everyone who comes gets one ticket, but we will also accept direct donations to Extralife for those who wish to receive additional tickets for prizes. Would this qualify for the up-to $20,000 charity matching mentioned on the website?
  • If we do raise funds, should we direct to our extra-life subreddit team page or just extra-life's generic donation page?
  • Are there any additional considerations for the donation matching we'd need to be mindful of?
• Would we be able to use funds to purchase or rent (seems to be more expensive actually) any additional Nintendo Switch consoles and controllers for use at any free-play or tournament stations?
• Is it possible to purchase small denomination Nintendo E-Shop gift-cards and other small prizes (such as /r/NintendoSwitch branded stickers, pins, etc.) for the giveaway?

We as a team are looking forward to doing a greater meetup for our community, so we thank you for making this opportunity possible!