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Over 80% of respondents want at least 3 months advance notice of upcoming competitions; nearly a third want 6 months notice. I was surprised to see that, but I agree. The grading standard is at least two months. I don't think most competitions have any idea that advance notice is important to their entrants. Hopefully our qualifying events (QE's) will take note and do what they can to update their web sites sooner. Nearly 40% want no more than a week between the close of the entry period and the competition itself (what I call lag time.) That’s a very tall order if you’re running a large competition. A surprising number of the QE’s have a lag time of 7 to 9 days, which seems like very little time to pull off a large competition. The grading standard is two weeks or less, and most QE’s can do that. While the responses do show that a short lag time is highly desirable, we have to realize that there are limits to what can reasonably be expected. I plan to stick with the two week standard because I think that's tough enough to do, even with great organization and commitment. On-line entry is strongly preferred; that’s no surprise to me. I think all of our QE’s have OLE now. About 50% strongly prefer on line payment. Hopefully more competitions will work in that direction. It costs a bit, but I find it well worth the cost. One thing I think entrants hate most about writing a check to pay for entries is that usually the competition people take weeks or even months to deposit the checks, and that can be pretty annoying of you like to run a tight checkbook. The elimination of all the paper accounting and processing should make things a lot easier on competition folks, and I think most are starting to figure that out. A pretty good majority wants results posted by the day after the competition, and that would be my expectation, although the grading system is more lenient. I post the results of the annual event by 10:00 PM the night of the event, and not only does my results page have quite a bit of frills, but I have to jump through a fair number of hoops to get it from spreadsheet format to HTML format. So it seems to me that if I can do it, anyone else should be able to do it too. But I try not to be as demanding of others as I am of myself. Most people want their score sheets to be postmarked within a week. That certainly seems reasonable to me. It’s nice to know that most people will accept scanned copies. Fifty percent say web site organization is important. I think most competition site pages could use a lot of improvement in that regard, but I’m not going to tell people how to do their web sites. I would hope they would at least review them and consider improvements. I try to keep the MCAB site as simple and direct as possible, but I certainly will consider any improvements that are suggested for the MCAB site. Two thirds think a specific link to where the results will be posted is important, and almost as many want an approximate date too. This is a no brainer – the results are going to be posted on a page, so why not put one great big, painfully obvious link to that page somewhere in a prominent and sensible place right from the start? And until results are posted, put a blurb saying when to expect them. Easy! And everyone loves it. About half think late walk-ins are an unfair advantage. A quarter or so think judges deserve a bribe, basically, and a quarter think it doesn’t matter. I think it matters and I really don’t like it, but that’s just my opinion. I don’t plan to make any rules about it, but I thought it was interesting to see what others think about it. There doesn’t seem to be a strong consensus for having equally distributed QE’s. Perhaps it will become more important as more people start entering more events. Speaking of more people entering more events, here's something that was a really pleasant surprise to me: Only a third of respondents said they entered only their local qualifying event. A little less than a third said they entered a couple, and a little more than a third said they entered a few or several. This tells me that people are interested in competing specifically in MCAB, and that indicates an upswing in interest. And I think that's a great sign, as long as it doesn't overburden the qualifying events.
All the things that I grade the QE's on - advance notice, lag time between entry due date and the actual competition date, on-line entry, time to post results and send score sheets and medals, and notice of when and where the results will be posted - were validated by the survey as being important to entrants (and this is the second survey to validate those things.) And according to most of the responses, the scoring system that I use is probably too lenient. The good thing for everyone is that the QE's have responded to the challenge and have worked very hard to serve their entrants well. Most of the QE's grade quite well now, and considering that no one had ever asked them to meet any particular standards until about two years ago, it can certainly be said that their response in most cases has been outstanding. I for one appreciate it and am proud that our events work hard to be leaders in service to entrants. I certainly hope that you, the participants, appreciate it too, and I hope you tell them how much you appreciate it.
When I was asked to drive the MCAB bus, I felt that it needed a bit of an overhaul. I felt it needed to work better and cater to its customers, and I felt it needed image upgrades too. I overlooked the obvious though: MCAB should be about high quality judges and high quality feedback on score sheets. I didn't so much overlook it as put it on the back burner - for one thing, I wanted to fix what I thought was broke first; for another, we didn't have any way to rate judge quality. We're working on that. The survey says judging is more important than anything else, so that's what we need to concentrate on next.
Bottle and cap restrictions: I had to re-write this. When I started the survey the bottle/cap question was a write-in question, not multiple choice - I changed it because it made sense to do so. The chart below shows the data shown on the survey responses web page and the actual data including the write-in responses (which is not shown on the web page.)
The corrected data shows that 50% support plain brown bottles with plain caps. The object of restrictions is anonymity of entries. You may feel it's unnecessary or ineffective, but competition directors have plenty of stories that say otherwise. The only legitimate objection I can see to restrictions is inconvenience and possibly cost. So here's the compromise: Any common brown long neck bottle, raised lettering OK. This is the classic beer bottle, but with common brand name raised lettering allowed. If you can't find brown long necks with or without common lettering, then you're really not trying very hard - they are everywhere. Caps: I'm drawing the line here - plain gold or silver. How much more does a bag of plain caps cost? I mean, really?! Can anyone give me any compelling reasons for not buying plain gold or silver caps, at least for competition bottling? You're competing on the national level now, and you should bottle your entries appropriately. I cannot see how this can possibly work a great hardship on anyone. Half the respondents said blacked out caps should be allowed, so does this mean that I'm ignoring the survey results? No, it means that I don't think you have any good reason for not spending an extra penny to buy an anonymous cap.
The only inconsistency I saw in the responses was that most people ranked low entry fee as the least important thing, yet a majority said they would hate it if the entry fees were raised 30%. I wonder if it would have come out any different if I had said “three dollars” instead of “30%.” Whatever; it’s clear that if anything has to go, the winners' shirts would be the first choice. I like them because they get the MCAB image out there. And I think it’s nice to have something to wear for bragging rights if you’re so inclined. There’s enough interest that we’ll definitely try to keep them in some form if we can. If not, we can always offer them for sale at cost to those who want them, if the quantities and pricing work out OK. Winners shirts will be given this year, at the very least, and they will be the same style as last year's. Yes, I know that we don't all agree on the style of the shirts, but we have to settle on something, and in my opinion it should be something a notch or two above a tee shirt. |
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