Become a kidzdays contributor

Every listing on this site is worth reading because somebody actually went. We can only be in one place on a Saturday, so we are opening the site up to other families in the North West. You were taking the kids somewhere anyway. Write it up, send us your photos, and it goes on the site with your name and a link to wherever you want people to find you.

Let us be straight about the money

There is none. We do not pay contributors and we are not going to pretend the byline is a wage. kidzdays carries no advertising and takes nothing from venues, so there is no pot to pay out of, and we would rather say that plainly than dress it up.

What you do get, and we mean these specifically:

• Your name on the piece, at the top, as the person who went. Not “the kidzdays team”.
• A link to one profile of your choosing, whether that is your Instagram, your blog, your TikTok or your photography site, on every piece you write.
• Your photo credit on every image of yours we use, including when it goes in the weekly email or on our social accounts.
• We share it. It goes out to the roundup list and on our own channels, tagging you.

If that is not worth your afternoon, do not do it, and no hard feelings. Plenty of people want somewhere their days out live other than their camera roll, and that is who this is for.

How it works

1. Apply using the form at the bottom. It takes about two minutes.
2. If it is a fit, we say yes and you tell us where you are off to. We are not going to send you anywhere. You go where you were going.
3. You have your day out, and you take photos while you are there.
4. You send us the write-up and the photos. We edit lightly, mostly for length and typos, and never to make you sound like us.
5. It goes live with your name and your link on it, and we tell you when.

Write as many as you like. There is no monthly limit on you. The only real limit is at our end: everything is read and edited by an actual person before it goes up, so if there is a queue we will tell you rather than leave you wondering.

What a good write-up has in it

Four hundred words is fine. Eight hundred is fine. Nobody is counting, and we would far rather have something short that you actually finished than a padded thousand. What we need is the stuff a listings site never tells you:

• What it actually cost, for how many of you, including parking and the inevitable ice cream.
• How long you were there before anybody got bored.
• Which ages it genuinely suits, and which age it does not, whatever the website claims.
• The practical stuff: parking, buggies, baby change, whether you can take your own food, what happens if it rains.
• The bit that was better than you expected, and the bit that was not worth it.
• One thing you would only know from having been.

Write it the way you would tell a friend at the school gate. First person, your own voice, a real opinion. If somewhere was disappointing, say so. We have never taken a penny from a venue and we are not about to start being polite about a bad one.

Photos

Four or more, taken by you, on the day. You will take fifty anyway. Send them as they came off the phone rather than screenshotted or filtered, landscape where you can because of how the site lays out, and of the place itself rather than only your own children smiling at the camera.

Two rules on photos that we do not bend:

• They have to be yours. Not the venue’s press pack, not something off Google. When you send them you are confirming you took them, and giving kidzdays permission to use them on the site, in the weekly email and on our social accounts, with your credit on them. You keep the copyright and can use them anywhere else you like.
• No other people’s children. Your own kids are fine if you are happy for them to be there. Nobody else’s child should be identifiable in any photo you send us. Wait for the queue to clear, or shoot wide.

Written by you, not by a machine

This is the one thing that decides whether the site is worth anything. We run every piece through an AI detector before it goes near the site. Anything that comes back as machine-written is not published, and that is the end of the arrangement. Nobody minds a spellchecker. A chatbot has not been to Chester Zoo.

Who this is not for

Free contributions attract a particular kind of email, so it is quicker to say this out loud than to reply to it forty times.

• The link is to a personal profile, not a business, and it carries a nofollow tag. If you are here to build backlinks, this will not do anything for you.
• You cannot write up your own attraction, or one you work for, or one a client of yours runs. If you run somewhere, we would still love to hear about it: tell us here instead.
• No write-up in exchange for a venue giving you something. If somewhere gave you free tickets or anything else, tell us and we will say so on the piece. It does not stop us publishing. Hiding it does.

And we do say no, to applications and occasionally to a finished piece. Nothing here costs you money, but it costs you an afternoon and us an edit, so we would rather be honest early than string anybody along.

Just want to tell us about somewhere, without writing it up? →