Community outreach: the 14-day relationship rule

Most outreach for contest campaigns is garbage. We say that as people who have been on the receiving end of it, and as people who have, embarrassingly, sent some of it ourselves in our early days before we figured out what we are now describing as the 14-day rule. The idea is simple. We do not pitch a community we have not been a participating member of for at least 14 calendar days. No exceptions, even when a client's contest deadline makes the timing painful.

This page explains why that rule exists, what we actually do during those 14 days, and a short list of tactics we refuse outright. If you came here from our services page wondering what "ethical outreach" means in practice, this is the long answer.

Why 14 days, not 3 or 30

Fourteen days is not magic. It is a compromise. Three days is not enough to understand how moderators handle promotional posts, what the regulars find annoying, or whether the community even allows external links. Thirty days is honest but commercially unrealistic for most contest timelines, which often run 21 to 45 days from launch to deadline. Two weeks lets us read at least ten threads, observe one full weekly cycle of activity, and message moderators with a real account that has actual post history.

We tried the shorter version. In 2022 we ran a two-day "scout and pitch" workflow for a Polish baking-contest client. Of the 23 communities we approached, 6 banned the account inside a week, 11 ignored us, and 4 of the remaining 6 responses came from communities so dead the engagement was effectively zero. One response was useful. That is a 4.3% hit rate, and the burned accounts were ours, not the client's. We changed the workflow after that.

What "membership" actually means to us

Lurking does not count. Membership for the purpose of this rule means:

• An account that existed before we joined the community (no fresh accounts spun up for outreach)
• At least 5 substantive comments or posts within the community during the 14 days
• Reading the pinned rules thread and the most recent moderator announcement
• At least one good-faith interaction with another member that has nothing to do with our client

If we cannot meet those four conditions, we do not pitch. We tell the client. Sometimes the client moves on and works with someone else. That is fine.

Disclosure: the part most agencies skip

Every outreach message we send discloses that we are paid. Not implied, not buried in a bio, not handled with the word "partner." We write the actual sentence: "I am being paid by [client] to help with their contest entry, and I wanted to ask whether your community allows posts about contest votes."

This is not just our preference. It is increasingly the legal baseline. The EU Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (2005/29/EC), updated through the Modernisation Directive effective 28 May 2022, treats undisclosed paid endorsements as a misleading commercial practice. You can read the consolidated text at eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2005/29/oj. Meta's Branded Content policies, last meaningfully revised on 14 February 2025, require the paid-partnership tag on posts where consideration has been exchanged. Reddit's content policy on undisclosed promotion is enforced site-wide by admins, not just subreddit moderators, and the consequences land on the account that posted, not on us behind the scenes.

Here is the mildly contrarian opinion we keep getting pushback on from prospective clients: disclosure does not hurt response rates. It helps them. Across the 47 outreach campaigns we ran between January 2024 and April 2026, messages that opened with explicit paid-relationship disclosure had a 31% response rate from moderators. Messages we sent earlier without disclosure (we stopped that practice in mid-2022) had a 19% response rate, mostly because honest mods could smell the omission and ignored us. People respect being told the truth at the start of a sentence rather than the end.

What the 14 days actually look like

This is the part nobody writes about because it is boring. Here is the sequence we follow for each community we identify as a potential fit for a client:

1. Days 1-3: Read-only. We read the pinned rules, the most recent 50 posts, and any "meta" threads about community norms. We screenshot the rules and save them in the client folder. If the rules explicitly ban contest promotion, vote solicitation, or "outside links," we close the file. No appeal, no DM to the mod asking for an exception.
2. Days 4-8: Light participation. We comment on threads where we have something genuine to add. Recipe questions, technical advice, opinions on whatever the community argues about. We do not post links. We do not mention the client. We do not upvote our own client's category strategically.
3. Days 9-12: Mod observation. We pay attention to how moderators handle borderline promotional content from other members. Some communities allow it on specific weekly threads. Some delete on sight. Some require pre-approval via modmail. We document this.
4. Day 13: Modmail. A short, plain message to moderators explaining who we are, who the client is, what they are entering, and asking whether a single post about the contest would be welcome. We attach a draft. We ask, we do not announce.
5. Day 14 onward: Post only if approved. If the mods say no, we accept the no and tell the client. If they say yes, the post we publish matches the draft we showed them, with the paid-partnership disclosure at the top, not the bottom.

A photography-contest client we worked with last September wanted us to pitch eight specialty hobby forums. After the 14-day observation period, we recommended pitching three. Two said yes. One said yes only if the disclosure used specific language they provided. The client got 217 contest entries from those two communities over nine days. The five we did not pitch would have produced bans, not entries. We genuinely believe that. We could not prove it without burning the accounts to find out.

What we refuse, explicitly

This is a "what we will not do" section, and we mean every line of it. If any of these are dealbreakers for you, we are not the right agency and you should not contact us.

No mass DMing

We do not send templated direct messages to community members asking them to vote, click, or share. Not on Reddit, not on Discord, not on Facebook groups, not on Telegram. Mass DM has a response rate floor and a ban ceiling, and the ceiling lands on whichever account did the sending. It is also against the terms of service of every major platform we work with. Meta's Community Standards on Spam, last updated in their Transparency Center on 11 March 2025, classify unsolicited promotional DMs as a violation regardless of disclosure status. Reddit's anti-spam policy permanently bans accounts that send promotional DMs at scale, and the platform's automated detection caught up with this years ago.

The honest reason we refuse, though, is not policy. It is that mass DMs are a tax on strangers, and strangers have not agreed to pay it.

No bait-and-switch entries

Some agencies create "engagement bait" — a fake giveaway, a fake job posting, a fake survey — to harvest emails or social-media follows, then redirect those people to vote for a client's contest entry. We do not do this. Ever. It is fraud against the people who clicked, and it is fraud against the contest platform, because those votes are not coming from genuinely interested people. They are coming from people who thought they were doing something else.

This boundary has cost us work. In March 2025 we turned down a project from a Warsaw-based skincare brand whose previous "growth agency" had built a 14,000-follower Instagram account using exactly this tactic and wanted us to repeat it for a contest push. We said no. They went elsewhere. We do not regret it.

No paying moderators without disclosure

Sometimes a moderator will say "happy to pin your post, what is the rate?" We will negotiate that. We will pay it if it is reasonable. But the post must be tagged as a paid placement, visible to every reader, on the post itself, not just in a side channel between us and the mod. Google's policy on misrepresentation, the version that took effect 31 May 2024 across Google Ads (support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/6020955), is the standard we apply across all paid placement, not just Google's own platforms. If a payment exists, the disclosure exists, full stop.

We had to walk away from a paid pin on a 38,000-member Polish parenting Facebook group in October 2024 because the mod refused to allow the "paid partnership" label on the post. The pin would have helped the client. The hidden payment would have helped the mod. Nobody else would have benefited, and the people seeing the post would have been quietly deceived. So we walked.

No vote-buying, no bots, no account farms

This should not need saying, but it does. We do not buy votes. We do not run bot networks. We do not maintain "aged" account farms to upvote client entries. We do not register on the contest platform on behalf of the client. We do not log into anyone else's account. If a contest can be won only by cheating, we cannot help, and we will tell you that on the first call.

Our refund policy is built around this: if at any point during a campaign a client asks us to do something on this list, we stop work, refund the unspent portion of the retainer, and end the engagement. We have done this twice in the last 18 months. We will do it again if we have to.

How we measure outreach without lying about it

The honest answer about outreach metrics is that attribution is fuzzy. UTM tags help. Trackable links help. Asking a community "where did you find this?" in a follow-up helps a little. But contest platforms rarely give us referrer data, and the people who saw a post on Tuesday and voted on Friday from their phone are not going to remember which community sent them.

We report what we can verify:

• Number of communities observed during the relationship-building phase
• Number of communities we recommended pitching, and number actually pitched
• Mod response rate and approval rate
• Click-through on the trackable link in approved posts
• Estimated reach based on community size and post visibility (clearly labeled as estimate)

We do not report "votes generated" as a clean number, because we cannot prove it. We do not promise vote counts before a campaign. We will not put a number in writing that we cannot stand behind.

What this means if you are shopping around

If another agency promises you 500 votes from "our community network" within 48 hours, ask them what their disclosure language looks like. Ask them how long they have been members of those communities. Ask them whether the communities know they are being approached commercially. If the answer is vague, the votes are coming from somewhere you do not want them coming from.

Our end-to-end process page covers the full timeline of a typical engagement, and our pricing page is honest about what 14 days of relationship-building costs in real billable hours. The 14-day rule is the slow part of what we do. It is also the part that keeps the work legitimate, and the part that lets us look at a campaign six months later without flinching.

If that pace works for you, the contact form is on the contact page. If it does not, we genuinely understand. There are faster agencies. Some of them are even good. Most of them are not us.