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Everybody loves contests! They are a great way to build engagement and to grow your network. For newcomers especially they are a very useful means to earn extra rewards and to get to know more people on the blockchain. There have been many types of contest on Steem, catering to all interests, and with prizes big and small. We would love to see more contests on Steem, so we have come up with a way to encourage more people to run more contests. --- ### The Contest Support Fund

One of the limitations that prevent people from running contests is lack of resources to offer prizes. Without a wealthy supporter to cover the prizes, many smaller Steemians can’t afford to offer prizes big enough to attract sufficient participants. We would like to help with this. **Through the Contest Support Fund we are offering to provide upvotes from the 1 M SP @steemcurator01 account as prizes…** * **1st prize - 100% upvote (currently $12)** * **2nd prize - 75% upvote** * **3rd prize - 50% upvote** We may be adding some liquid STEEM to the fund later on. --- ### How to Apply

If you have an idea for a contest, or are already running one, just make a brief post describing how your contest works, how you promote it, how many people you expect to participate (or already enter for existing ones), and why you would like the Contest Support Fund to help with the prizes. The contests can be of any type, but must be free to enter without any upvoting requirements. They must be exclusive to Steem. Tag your posts with #contestsupportfund and drop a link in the comments below. We will initially be supporting up to five contests per week, although this may be modified once we see how much the fund is used. There will be no closing date for applications, the Support Fund will be ongoing until further notice. We will also be promoting the contests we support in these 100 Days posts. --- --- ### Notes from the Community...

#### APPICS Referral System

Have you tried APPICS yet? It is a great mobile dApp that we recently gave a large delegation to. They are now running a referral scheme to help recruit users. They have already had over 650 new signups... * [**In the last few weeks alone, we had 650+ NEW users joining APPICS through the referral...**](https://steemit.com/appics/@appics/appics-v1-appics-im-134790) There are some talented people on APPICS - for example @ytpaulap. Check out her excellent cover of I’m Here from the musical The Colour Purple… * [**Something to keep you entertained**](https://steemit.com/appics/@ytpaulap/appics-v1-appics-im-133657) --- #### Give a Thumbs Up for Steem

@seo-boss has spotted this approval rating system for different coins on Coingecko. * [**Are you going to support Steem?**](https://steemit.com/steem/@seo-boss/are-you-going-to-support-steem) STEEM has been showing a quite negative rating. If you support Steem maybe you can hop over to Coingecko and give STEEM a thumbs up... * https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/steem --- --- Thank you, _The Steemit Team_