Flag Competition Winners Get Their Prizes
Friday, October 5th, 2012
A big thank you to everyone who took part in the ‘Flags of the World’ Competition last month. It was a resounding success with everyone – the children who participated, the parents and the town centre shops and businesses. We now plan to run a similar competition (only bigger and better!) again next year.
The 3 winners were presented with their prizes in Antelope Walk on Monday. Mark Strudwick took first prize, winning an £80 voucher to spend in a Dorchester shop. The runner up was Holly Holdcroft, who received a £40 voucher and an extra £20 from Toymaster. Finally, third prize went to Caleb Cheffey, who took home a £20 voucher and £10 from Toymaster. We thank Toymaster for their generosity in supplementing the prizes with some extra spending money.
Overall we had 100 completed entries, and 60% of those were completely correct, so it was a tough job for us to pick the winners. Well done to all the children, parents and grandparents who got involved in the hunt, and thanks for all the wonderful feedback we have received since the competition closed.
One parent wrote to us to say that the competition “kept my sons amused for many hours over the summer holidays. I visited many shops that I had never been in before, and it has definitely improved their knowledge of national flags.”
Another told us “Although I have shopped in Dorchester many times, I haven’t always explored all of the alleyways, and obviously that was part of the idea of this challenge, but it really worked! We met lots of very friendly shop assistants and discovered all sorts of shops I certainly never knew were there.”
We’ve also had great feedback from the shops who joined in – nearly all of them have reported huge increases in footfall, with lots of new customers coming in telling them “I didn’t even know you were here!” Many have told us that this has translated into a growing number of repeat visits since the end of the competition. Great news!
Credit has to go to Dennis at the Town Council for coming up with the original idea, and also to the Chamber of Commerce who helped to support the flag hunt with the BID.
We’d like to offer a final thank you to everyone who got involved with the competition on Twitter. We used our Twitter account (@DorchesterBID) to tweet cryptic clues for the location of some of the trickier to find flags, and saw many flag hunters use the network to share intelligence when they got stuck, which really added to the fun of the competition.
If you have any thoughts or stories about the flag hunt you’d like to share with us, please leave us a comment below. We’d love to hear from you!
