How to price an online voting campaign

Decide what the campaign has to raise: venue, sound, prizes, photography, and a margin. Then work backwards. If you need UGX 6,000,000 and expect to keep 70% of voting revenue, you need roughly UGX 8,600,000 in gross votes — about 8,600 boosts at the UGX 1,000 base rate.

Now sanity-check that against your field. Thirty contestants each bringing 300 paid votes gets you there. Thirty contestants each bringing 40 does not, and no amount of clever bundling fixes it — you need more contestants or bigger networks.

The first vote a supporter buys is a decision about whether to participate at all. Keep that decision cheap. A UGX 1,000 single boost lets a student support a friend without thinking about it, and a supporter who has voted once will vote again.

Bundles are where the revenue actually comes from: the aunt, the employer, the alumni group who want their candidate to win and will happily buy fifty votes at a lower unit price.

Two moments produce most of a campaign's revenue: the launch week, and the final 72 hours. Plan your strongest push for those windows rather than discounting continuously, which just trains supporters to wait.

Publish a weekly standings update. Nothing moves votes like a supporter discovering their nominee has slipped to fourth.

Budget on your net, not the gross. You keep 70% of paid voting revenue, and each withdrawal to Mobile Money carries a small fixed processing fee that scales with the amount — so plan fewer, larger withdrawals rather than weekly small ones.