K. I'm really not surprised to find this thread here, and to find that the staff is re-thinking the challenge system here. I did notice myself that participation in those challenges has gone way down, which is why I was expecting changes to come. Comparing this year's challenges to previous challenges, I don't remember participation numbers ever being this low (at least in all the years that I have been here at SSD). That might have to do with an overall trend (people these days not being interested in doing challenges; I don't know, coz I don't follow other stores to have a point of reference here), but, really, it might simply have to do with the current challenge system here at SSD not appealing to a great number of people.
I for myself have done the challenges ever since I started out here at SSD. Esp. in the beginning they were a great inspiration for me to scrap and scrap. This year, I must say I scrapped less than ever since starting to digiscrap. It might possibly be a missing mojo (though I still enjoy doing CT layouts), but I think the lack of inspiration/motivation to scrap for challenges may have had a greater impact. While I did like only doing 4 layouts a month to earn points, the challenge in some ways was much greater because even though at the beginning of this year it was promised to keep the prompts so open/flexible that it would be easy to do them, often they were not. Many a times I felt, how am I ever going to scrap a page that meets the requirements of this challenge? (It was either impossible for me to take the kind of photo that was required for the challenge, or the technique was so specific that I did have to scrap a page specifically for this challenge, in order to not lose the month's reward points - meaning I didn't really scrap this page for myself.)
And since we're talking about reward points already: for me it was somewhat of a huge disappointment that rather than earning a monthly 40% off, now that was reduced to quarterly. Miss only one challenge, then you'd have to wait another whole month to earn the 40% (and at the end of the month you sometimes only had a couple of days to get that last layout in in time). (Though I must acknowledge that since September the staff was generous enough to allow a couple of bonus 40% for participants. But then again, these months there have been so many sales at SSD already that getting those extra 40% really didn't make that much of a difference.) Putting all of that together, I noticed that I ended up spending less money on products here at SSD than ever before (and there certainly isn't a lack of good products here, SSD is still my favorite digi store in the world!).
Having said all that, here are my preferences:
I definitely prefer greater choice and flexibility to fewer challenges a month. Seeing something like the old Pinterest challenges revived would be awesome. And to offer opportunities to earn 40% off each month. But hearing how others loved the idea of accumulating reward points over several months - maybe that could be worked into the system as well.
Whatever you ladies come up with, though, I'm SSD through and through and I don't think that's going to change any time soon! I just love this place too much!
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