UGC Campaign Calculator

This calculator projects how many pieces of user-generated content a campaign will actually produce, not just how many people saw it. Expected submissions start from your reach and participation rate, then get adjusted by two multipliers baked into the model: a platform factor (TikTok is weighted 1.5x baseline since short-form video sharing is frictionless there, while Twitter/X and LinkedIn are weighted down to 0.6x and 0.4x since those audiences post original UGC less readily) and a duration factor computed as the square root of campaign length in weeks, capped at 2.0x. That square-root shape is deliberate — it models diminishing returns, since a 28-day campaign does not get 4x the submissions of a 7-day one, only roughly 2x, because early hype fades and late joiners are a shrinking pool.

Of the submissions you get, only a portion are "quality" — usable, on-brand content — and the model assumes 45% quality when you're paying an incentive versus 30% for a purely organic ask, since incentives attract more effortful entries. Total incentive cost is simply expected submissions times your per-submission payout, and ROI compares that spend against an assumed $150 equivalent value for each quality piece (roughly what commissioning original content creation would cost). The biggest input risk is participation rate: it's the single most sensitive variable, and real-world rates below 1% are common for cold audiences, so pulling this number from a genuine past campaign rather than guessing will make every downstream number meaningfully more trustworthy.