Hi Dan!

@coruscate and @anomadsoul of Steem Onboarding here.

First of all, massive congrats on your upcoming wedding and honey moon. That’s so exciting!

Love that you are wanting to help grow the community – even while you are away. This seems like a perfect collaboration for Steem Onboarding, as helping to onboard new users is what we are all about. Here’s our proposal for a fun contest idea, that we believe will be extremely effective.

Abstract:

A contest to encourage current steemians to onboard people they know. Twitter campaigns can be great for brand awareness – but actually talking to their musician friend, or small business owner brother, or favorite blogger about Steem introduces the personal connection piece that can be so key to user retention. Many don’t want to spend the time explaining everything to their friends and family though – which is where steemonboarding.com comes in. They will be able to send the link to the people they onboard to start the learning process and answer many of their initial questions. The site is currently available in 10 languages – which makes this contest accessible to a greater percentage of users.

To avoid spamming this contest, and to help ensure the people who are onboarded will get plugged in and have a good experience right away – we will also require the new user create their introduction post within the contest period. Those who actually make their first post within the first week or so they are on the platform have a much higher retention rate. This will also help us verify that these seem to be legitimate users.

OCD Has Offered to Curate These New Users!

The other awesome thing that we bring to the table is our witness partnership with @ocd. We will be able to curate these new users on their introduction post with OCD/Blocktrades votes to help motivate and encourage them from the start.

Details:

• Contest runs until May 31st.
• At the end of the month, steemians will make a post listing all the members they onboarded and linking to their introduction post so we can verify they appear to be real users.
• We will create a specific tag for the contest that new users can put on their post so we can easily find and curate them. We will also ask them to tag the person that brought them onto the platform.
• Prizes will be awarded based on the most amount of people onboarded. The 1k steem will be broken up into five prizes – 300, 250, 200, 150 and 100 to equal a total of 1,000 steem.
• OCD will also give a 1k delegation to the group or community that attracts the most users. So even if someone doesn't win one of the top five spots - they can still help get their community a small delegation. Examples could be @openmic, @vegansofsteemit, a geographic group etc.

This seems like a win-win! By adding in the OCD component of this contest, both the new user and the seasoned steemian benefit! Of course the contest post would have more detailed info on everything – but here is an overview of what we are thinking. Let us know what you think!