Inside the Bookstore:
Running a Practice Competition
o matter how creative your lessons, there will be times when everything feels just a little...ho hum. Where this week feels just a little too much like last week, and nobody seems to be particularly excited about next week.
The best defence against the same-old-weekly-grind is definitely offence—to create an Event that will get your studio buzzing, and your students practicing.
Studio recitals and workshops can do the job, but nothing works quite so dramatically as a competition. Choose your prizes, create the pre-competition hype...then light and stand well back. If you get this right, you're in for some serious practice fireworks.
So how do you set up a competition like this? What are the little extras that can make such a big difference? And how can you get it all done without blowing your budget and creating more work than you can handle?
IMT takes you on a tour of the possibilities below—when you're done, you might also want to check out our guide on creating Studio Awards.
Major sporting events or rock concerts don't just happen—they are announced well in advance so that anticipation becomes a promotion force in it's own right. It's the reason that Pixar show trailers for their new films long before the film itself will be released.
So how far in advance should you be heralding your Practice Championship? Compare the following two statements, and then ask yourself—as a student, which would you be more excited about?
1: "Sally, there's a practice competition starting today. Here's your sheet to fill in your times..."
2: "Sally, in September of this year, there's going to be a Studio Practice Championship. I'll be letting you know more about it as we get closer, but it's going to be huge."
September, thinks Sally. But that's six months away...it MUST be huge if we're being warned about it already.
And so the Championship is already larger than life, simply because it's something she has to wait for.
To keep building the excitement, every few weeks, release a little more information about the competition itself—never the full picture, just a new piece of the puzzle.
So you might dedicate one page of your next studio newsletter to outlining the prizes on offer. You could even include photos, if you really want the students circling September on their calendars already.
Then a month after that, you might take some time in the lesson to explain some of the many different ways to win.
A letter home a month after that might give the dates for the competition, asking students not to schedule trips away during that time if at all possible.
Then there might be a newsletter featuring a profile on some of last year's winners.
By the time the competition arrives, anticipation will be at fever pitch. Which means that when you finally do say "Sally, the practice competition starts today. Here's your sheet to fill in your times.", it's all she'll be talking about in the car on the way home...most of your students will practice as soon as they get home.
With the surge in practice that your Practice Championships will produce, it might be tempting to think about having a competition permanently in place. Resist this temptation though—you'll strip the competition of the very thing that gives it its impact, and your practice goose will quickly start laying ungilded eggs again.
It's the reason that the Olympic Games is not an annual event. The fact that it only happens every four years adds enormously to the sense of occasion and drama—nothing would devalue the concept of a Gold Medal faster than knowing that another chance to get one is just around the corner.
So limit your practice championships to being a biennial event at most, so that you can hype it in advance, epilogue it once it's gone, and imbue with an air of mystique while it's here.
The problem with having a single prize is that once students realize that they're not on the leaderboard, there's little incentive to keep working (See the IMT guide to Studio Awards). So instead of just handing out a prize for "most practice", the aim is to have many, many categories of prizes so that your students have plenty of possible rewards to aim at.
This means that even if they're being left for dead in the overall total, they still have reasons to keep participating. Try some of these:
• Best single day of practice
• Most consecutive days of at least 30 minutes
• Most practice over a weekend
• Highest minimum practice recorded
• Most practice by a beginner
• Most days overall of 90 minutes or more
• Most practice by a Wednesday student
• Fewest days of 10 minutes or less
• Great start: Student who did the most practice in the first week
• Highest total for the Double Week
• Greatest improvement since last practice championship
You'll think of plenty of your own, but with so many possible prizes on offer, when the time comes to announce the awards in your newsletter, lots of your students will feature on the honor roll.
Having the title of "champion" is nice, but if you really want your students excited about winning, then you need some exciting prizes. You need to budget for this, but anything you spend will more than pay for itself—motivated students are students who stay in the studio. So you're not just buying a prize, you're making an investment in retention rates.
What makes a good prize? One way to find out is actually to put that to your students. When you first announce the competition, tell them that you're looking for prize suggestions—you'll hear some great ideas.
Otherwise, try to imagine the sorts of presents they'd really like to unwrap on their birthday. No socks or underwear here:
• Mp3 player
• Voucher from computer game store
• Book vouchers
• Book of cinema tickets
• Family pass to a theme park
Keep this issue in mind as you watch television—you'll find yourself noticing ads for hot toys and gadgets. If you've noticed these ads, chances are your students have too.
That voucher from the computer game store might excite the computer game junkies in your studio, but not everyone is going to want that. One way around this is to announce that the prize is "your choice of...", and then have several options that will appeal to different students. Once you know who the winner is, you'll know what to get.
If you want to offer rewards that will really have your students salivating—without sending yourself broke in the process—you might want to consider a multi-studio competition.
Even with lots of prizes on offer, not everyone is going to win, which can leave some hard working students wondering whether they'll bother next time. That's where certificates come to the rescue.
These awards are available not to "winners", but to anybody who fulfils certain criteria during the competition. The students would all know what is required to be awarded certificates, and are guaranteed the award once they've met the requirement.
So what might be worthy of certificates?
Consistency: Anybody who doesn't skip a single day of practice throughout the competition.
Bronze certificate: Anybody who does at least 5 hours of practice in each week of the competition
Silver certificate: Same as Bronze, but with a 7 hour each week requirement
Gold: For serious practicers. A 10 hour requirement, every week, for the life of the competition.
Aggregate targets: For students who perhaps work better in bursts rather than consistently - these certificates would reward certain totals being reached over the lifetime of the competition, without worrying about what happens on individual days.
15 minutes more than last time: Whatever the student's daily average was in the last competition, they'd need to beat it by more than 15 minutes in the this competition to earn one of these.
You'll think of plenty of your own, but the important thing is that all students know exactly what is required before the competition starts, so that they know what they're aiming at.
Next: adding some WOW! to your competition