voteMe.livevoteMe.live homevoteMe.livevoteMe.live homeA step-by-step case study of how a fashion designer in Kumasi ran a 200-contestant pageant using voteMe.live's nominations and reconciliation tools.
voteMe.live Team
This is a story about a fashion event organizer in Kumasi — we'll call her Akosua — who ran her first structured online pageant in 2024 with over 200 nominees across 5 categories. She used voteMe.live's nominations feature to collect public submissions, the reconciliation tool to clean up the data, and paid voting to drive revenue during the finals.
Here is exactly how she did it.
Akosua had run informal polls on Instagram Stories before — "Comment to nominate your favorite" posts that generated thousands of comments but created enormous manual data-cleaning work. Names were spelled differently, the same person appeared dozens of times, and there was no systematic way to contact nominees or verify their details.
For this pageant, she decided to use a proper platform.
Event type: Voting (paid/awards-style) Categories: Most Stylish Student, Best Fashion Content Creator, Rising Designer, Most Influential Fashionista, Fan Favourite Look of 2024 Nomination fee: Free (she chose not to charge for nominations) Voting price: GHS 1.50 per vote Platform fee on voting: 10%
Akosua opened nominations for three weeks via /events/missglam2024/nominate. She shared the link in her Instagram bio, through WhatsApp groups, and had each of her existing followers spread it further.
The nomination form asked for: nominee name, phone number (E.164 format), TikTok handle (prioritised over Instagram for identification), and the nominator's name.
Phone number was the hard deduplication key. The platform prevented the same phone number from being nominated twice in the same category. This eliminated the most common manipulation tactic immediately.
At the end of three weeks, she had 847 nominations across her five categories.
The Reconciliation Kanban showed her a three-column view: Pool (raw nominations), Groups (merged duplicates), and Contestants (promoted finalists).
The platform had automatically grouped nominations with similar names. "Adwoa Boateng", "Adwoah Boateng", and "Adwoa Boateing" from three different nominators with three different phone numbers were surfaced as a soft-match group — the same person nominated under slightly different spellings.
Akosua's process:
The reconciliation took about four hours spread over two evenings — far faster than her previous manual Instagram comment approach.
Each promoted nominee automatically became a contestant. Because the event was paid voting, each contestant received a unique 4-letter USSD short code automatically. Akosua exported the contact list as a CSV (which included name, phone, email, TikTok handle, and category) and reached out to each finalist to confirm their participation and share their short code for campaigning.
Voting ran for two weeks. She promoted it heavily on social media with Studio-generated contestant flyers — one per contestant, batch-exported as a ZIP file, all with the voteMe.live watermark in the corner. Each flyer showed the contestant's photo, name, category, short code, and a QR code linking to their vote page.
The USSD channel turned out to be crucial. A significant number of votes came from feature phone users in the Ashanti region who could not access the web vote page but could dial the USSD code with their Mobile Money balance.
Total votes cast: 48,000 Total gross revenue: GHS 72,000 Platform fee (10%): GHS 7,200 Akosua's share: GHS 64,800
She ran the entire event from her phone and laptop, with one assistant helping manage contestant communications.
The nomination deduplication alone saved her two full days of manual work. The automatic short code generation meant she never had to create or track codes manually. And the real-time leaderboard during the voting period created daily social media buzz as supporters shared screenshots of their favourites' rankings.
Her main advice for other pageant organizers: collect TikTok handles during nominations, not Instagram. TikTok handles are more unique and easier to verify, which makes the reconciliation process much faster.
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