A pageant lives or dies on the boring parts: who entered, who voted, who paid, and who got crowned without an argument. Get those right and the night runs itself. This is the order to do them in, from the first entry form to the last payout, for an organiser in South Africa doing it for the first time.
1. Decide what you are actually running
Pageant covers a lot of ground. A primary-school princess morning, a Miss matric ball crowning, a provincial Miss with a sash and a finale, an awards night for a community. They share a shape, but the size of the prize, the entry fee, and the number of nights all flow from this one decision. Write it in a sentence before anything else: who can enter, where, and what they win.
2. Lock the date and a rough budget
Pick a finale date far enough out to sell tickets into, usually six to ten weeks. Work backwards from there for the entry deadline and the voting window. Your budget has two sides:
- Money out:venue, sound, lighting, sashes and crown, photographer, judges’ refreshments, prizes.
- Money in: entry fees, online votes, ticket sales, sponsors, programme adverts.
You do not need a printing budget for tickets or a float for the door if you sell online. That is the part iKhetha takes off your plate, and it is free to list, so the platform itself is not a line item until you start selling.
3. Open entries
Collect each contestant’s name, a photo, a short story or bio, and a contact number. Keep the form short. The longer it is, the fewer entries you get. If you charge an entry fee, say what it covers.
4. Set up the judging
Decide early how the winner is chosen, and tell everyone up front. The three common models:
- Judges only: a panel scores on the night. Clean, but the crowd has no say.
- Public vote only: the crowd decides through online voting. Popular, and it raises money, but it rewards the biggest following rather than the best performance.
- A split: judges carry most of the score, the public vote carries the rest. This is what most well-run pageants land on.
Whatever you choose, publish the weighting before voting opens. An argument about the rules after the result is the one thing that sinks a pageant’s reputation.
5. Open online voting
Online voting is where a pageant funds itself and builds its crowd. Each contestant gets a page, supporters vote from their phones, and a live leaderboard keeps everyone coming back. You can run a free daily vote to pull traffic and paid vote packages to raise money, side by side.
The full setup, free votes, paid packages, the leaderboard, and the safeguards that stop a result being rigged, is its own job. We walk through it in how to set up online voting for a competition.
6. Sell tickets to the finale
The crowning night is your biggest single earner. Sell tickets online so the money is in before the doors open and the door itself is just a scan, not a cash desk. Set a few ticket types if you want, general standing, a seated table, a VIP row, and let people pay by card or instant EFT.
Step-by-step, including the QR tickets and scanning a fast door, is in how to sell event tickets online in South Africa.
7. Run the night
- Brief your door team. One person scans, one person directs, and the queue keeps moving.
- Close online voting at a clear time and show the final leaderboard on the big screen. The crowd watching the numbers settle is half the drama.
- Tally the judges and the public vote against the weighting you published. Have a second person check the maths.
- Crown, photograph, thank your sponsors by name.
8. The money side, plainly
On iKhetha you keep 85% of everything you earn, votes and tickets alike, and the platform takes 15%. There is no monthly fee and nothing to pay to list. Your share settles directly to your own bank account through a registered South African payment provider, so you are never waiting on a manual payout or chasing anyone for your money.
To take payments you complete a short verification once: your details and your bank account, approved by our team. After that every event you run settles to the same account. See pricing for the full breakdown.
Ready to start
You can have a pageant page live, with voting open, before the day is out. List your event and set up the line-up, or look at events already running to see how other organisers have laid theirs out.