United Paws fundraising idea query

[Alondro]

I've had an interesting idea for a fundraising drive for my animation company, United Paws Animations, and am dropping it around several places to see what the general level of interest is.

It'd be a code-breaking contest with a prize of $100 (and perhaps both Pedaling Paws T-shirts as well if I can do this early enough to have all the money raised added into the Pedaling Paws mileage pool) for the first person to break the code.

How it'd work:  $1 to enter, entry period for two weeks.  After entry period, the coded message is emailed to all who have entered (and I already know to make abundantly clear that spam filters need to be set to allow emails from United Paws).  The first email received with the correct decoding of the message is the winner (or should I do one of those staggered winners as they do on radio contests, 13th caller and so forth?).

If no winner comes forth in a week, there will be the option to buy clues at $5 a clue.  Each clue will be a portion of the key needed to unlock the message, and each person that week will receive the same clue (and a time-saver for those who know how to use algorithms, don't bother trying to use them.  I'm not using that method for the key as it's too easy for computer programs to break them.)  Every week after that until the message is decoded, a new clue will be up for sale.  I suspect it will be broken by no later than the second clue.  I'd be shocked if it made it to the 8th.  (That's a clue!)

Since those clues will be sent out individually, I'll be using different emails from different locations to send them (as shall be noted in the official rules, in case some smartass tries to hack my main email account).

As for the message itself, it will have few to no repeating words, and thus shall prove quite a tricky cipher.  Note: the previous sentance had no repeating words.  Note:  That's not the message.   

I welcome questions, comments, and suggestions on how to improve the contest if something's lacking.  I'm thinking of making a United Paws Facebook or Myspace page and putting the contest up there... but I dread social networking sites for the spam and viruses and stalkers. 

[Turnsky]

Y'know, just a thought, but if you wanna grab the interest of people, it'd be good to show something that'd... you know, interest them.


Instead of just taking you upon your word, that is. 'Cuz right now, i don't see much information beyond your post.

[Nyil]

After doing a bit of Googling, I managed to find the United Paws website, and I have to say that I'm pretty excited to see animations with Ursula Vernon on staff to help things along. I just wish I could see some of these animations, even if all you had to show was a few-second preview. You've got some pretty big names listed in the team section of your site, I have no doubt that any bit of animation would leave us all floored.

[Alondro]

This contest is just in the basic planning stage right now.  I'm just seeing if this sort of contest would spark enough interest.

No animation is being worked on yet.  As you noted, we have some fairly big names on board, plus bigger ones who are just tenative until funding grows and becomes steady.  We need to raise several thousand just for a single rough draft animation of the shortest stories.

Good animation is expensive.  I am considering a simple flash version of one story as a demo.