by T. Scott
July 16, 2009

Admit it, when you see a “sign up to win” contest/promotion, some small part of you wonders if there really is going to be a winner.

Must be because I’ve been around politics too long, but those kinds of doubts usually flash through my mind — especially when I’ve taken the trouble to sign up.

Let me chase away any suspicions, however fleeting, about Dome’s giveaways. Listed below are the real-life winners of our first five.

Why do we do such promotions? Two reasons.

First, they’re fun, both in finding neat stuff to attract entries and then giving it away and hearing why the lucky winners signed up.

Second, we use it as an enticement for you to give us your e-mail address so we can send you the Dome bulletins several times a month alerting you to new postings of articles and columns. And that’s all we use the e-mails for, because we’ve promised not to sell or share our lists.

When Dome began nearly two years ago, we employed a cumbersome system for collecting e-mails along with gender and zip code data — which we believed was a fair trade for all-free content. Most readers didn’t mind “registering,” but a few visitors were turned off by disclosing any information at all. After several months we decided it really was too clunky and got in the way of the Dome experience, so we junked it.

Since the beginning of this year, then, we’ve offered monthly “sign up to win” promotions in order to provide an additional incentive for getting on our bulletin list. How do we select the winners? Each month, each entrant is put on a numbered list, and at the end of that month an online “random number generator” spits out the number of the winner. Quick, easy and bias-free!

By the way, even if you’re already on our distribution list you can sign up each month for the goodie giveaway. The more entries the better!

This month’s lure is a wonderful beach towel from no less than Grand Hotel! What could be more Michigan summery? For a chance to win and enjoy the luxury for this season and seasons to come, simply sign up here.

And here are our winners so far:

#1 The 2008 Friends of the Capitol 6th Annual Holiday Ornament, won by Aimee Sterk of Jenison. She is employed at the Michigan Disability Rights Coalition in East Lansing and said the ornament would help her husband and her commemorate their first year of marriage and remind them of their trips to the U.S. Capitol and Michigan’s Capitol.

#2 The 2008 Dome Magazine 1st Annual “Nature of Michigan Series” tile, won by Sherie Veramay of Kalamazoo. She is director of development for the College of Education at Western Michigan University and had Dome recommended to her by a friend as “an excellent source of information about public policy matters in Michigan.”

#3 A 2009 Sunshine Week (Your Right to Know) Tshirt, won by Mark Neisler of East Lansing. He is an environmental advocate/global climate change specialist for the Michigan League of Conservation Voters Education Fund in Ann Arbor and said he reads Dome regularly.

#4 Another 2009 Sunshine Week Tshirt, won by Leanne C. Trebilcock of Owosso. She is the former owner/publisher of the Pioneer-Tribune newspaper in Manistique and started reading Dome when her son, Christopher Trebilcock, a partner in the Detroit office of the Miller Canfield law firm, sent her a Dome story about his entrepreneurial venture into politics-branded wine.

#5 A The Waters of Michigan coffee-table book by David Lubbers and Dave Dempsey, won by Kate Redman of Lansing. A lawyer who clerks for Supreme Court Justice Michael Cavanagh, she said she wanted to win the book because “as a lifelong Michigander and Great Lakes water basin enthusiast, I can’t imagine that there is anyone who wouldn’t want the book!” She was introduced to Dome by columnist Craig Ruff, who taught a class she took at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.

That’s the list so far. Without doubt, these are great winners!

PS. If you have a product or service you think would make an attractive giveaway (or if you have an idea for a relatively inexpensive one you’d like to win), please shoot us an e-mail at dome@domemagazine.com.

PS2. Leanne (#4 above) asked me to mention that she is retired and does neighborhood outreach. Specifically, she self-funds a group of 60-80 children who meet once a week all year. She wrote: “I continue my interest in politics, especially, because of the impact I see government has on the lives of these children and their families, who for the most part face grave economic challenges. I also see the effect of broad school policies that do not consider children who can’t afford to have a computer in their homes or who don’t have an adult to help them either with school work or to simply get up and dressed in the morning. I would appreciate input from your readers on ways to help these children and ways to find additional funding for this program, which is starting its eighth year, as I have no pension and am not a wealthy woman. Last year, thanks to an individual who donated backpacks, Funfest was able to give 80 children school-supplies-filled backpacks.”