My advice to someone who is running an essay competition.

  1. Give an example, such as one of last year’s reports, a good article you can find online etc.
  2. Specify details of what information you expect (i.e. returns you can make over a 1-year horizon)
  3. Specify details of are the criteria for what you consider good (i.e., the strategy must be new or your essay is deeper than what is out there)
  4. If possible, give them an online form to fill in exactly the information you need, as opposed to a pdf
  5. If you want to save time reading the submissions, ask them to write an executive summary, for example in bullet point form
  6. Sometimes it can be useful to ask for specifics in formatting and writing so that your submissions look similar. External jury members may particularly appreciate that. For example, the host of one guest blog I wrote asked me to formulate the title as a sentence and to include at least one graph.

Any other thoughts welcome!

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