NCAA tournamament contest groups

I'm sure someone on this board knows the answer to this, so I'm throwing it out there:

As noted before, I am now working for a national trade organization for car dealers. We were brainstorming the other day and decided to check into holding an NCAA tournament picks contest for our members, with the prize a free registration fee for our annual convention.

We have about 16,000 members. We were thinking all we'd have to do is create a private group on Yahoo or ESPN.com or CBS Sportsline and give our members the password to enter. But do those sites allow groups that big? Is there a limit? And if there is and we're over it, any ideas on who we could get to run this contest?

I'll hang up and listen.

 

I don't know about the mechanics involved, but the idea of having 16,000 people in an unregulated online group sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. Profane usernames, abuse of the group message function, people passing the invites on to other unaffiliated friends, you name it.

 

Pretty sure Yahoo only allows 100 users per group. I would think ESPN and the others would be similar.


Why not do it by division (state, region, dealership, etc)? Then just compare the final tallies at the end? Not the best way, I'm sure. But better than doing 16K ballots by hand.

 

There is a limit...we use it for our newspaper contest and come in just under the margin most years. I think CBSsportsline is either 100 or 200 members. So yes, for 16,000 that probably isn't an option, and would be a ton of work for someone to work out on an excel sheet.

Not sure what the answer would be for you.

 

I'm guessing there are places you could hire out to run/organize a group of that size for you.

 

I don't think CBS has a low limit. I joined the SI "Hot Clicks' contest last year on CBS and it was pretty big -- several thousand I believe. However, there was a major issue. The group message board automatically defaults to emailing every member when every post is put up. It became an absolute mess until the settings were changed.