A few moments ago we emailed our overall competition winner with the fantastic news that one of his images, submitted via Instagram and captioned with our #Fiestagram hashtag, has won him a brand new Ford Fiesta.

Considering artistic interpretation, photographic skill and originality, our esteemed panel of judges (including our own discerning Blue Hive staff) managed to whittle down over 16,000 images to find this deserving winner.

Stepping into this forthright creative community was not without its risks. For example, would there be an aggrieved sense of a brand encroaching into their territory? Well, we’re delighted to report that we’ve been overwhelmed by the strength of positive feeling and the self-moderating community actually silenced a couple of naysayers themselves.

Each new theme was met with genuine excitement and there were sincere congratulations to each of the six winners, some of whom couldn’t contain their joy: “Yeeeeeeeeeeeeees yes yes yes yes yeeeeees!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thanks so much. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!!!!!” was @Daveystarr’s heartfelt response to discovering that he’d won our #Hidden challenge and the prize of a new Canon SLR camera.

Both the standard and volume of entries we received was amazing. And moderation was easy because we simply didn’t receive the raft of pornographic images we were steeling ourselves for!

The moderated photos appeared in the Facebook gallery, relevant to the particular weekly challenge, and once each theme had closed the Fiestagram team speedily created a shortlist, dispatched it to the judges, created a Facebook album for public perusal then announced the winner within 48 hours. As well as their prize, each winner was sent a congratulatory letter from the Fiestagram team, further elevating their sense of achievement (as well as demonstrating the team’s gratitude). As just one winner put it, “The letter that came with it was really great too. It made me feel really extra proud.”

So after seven weeks of hard work, fun and inspiration, we at the Fiestagram team are a little sad to see this exhilarating campaign come to an end. And there’s one other small problem; our Community Manager now has to work out what to do with his first weekend off in two months. Ideas on a postcard to…