Challenge Creation: A step by step guide

This guide is a step by step tutorial that will run you through the process of creating a challenge, from start to finish.

The Planning Stage

First, you must have a challenge idea! Ask yourself, "What are my objectives?" Once you've determined what objectives are, you can select what type of Challenge would help you achieve those things.

Do you want to build relationships and engage advocates? Use fun challenges. Do you want to get feedback from your advocates? Ask them questions and present survey challenges. Do you want to generate social media buzz? Present articles and content that they can share.

Second, you must determine which subset of your advocates should see this Challenge. Targeting helps you create a more tailored experience for your advocates.

With the objectives set, the type of Challenge determined, and the targeted group set, you're ready to start building. So now it's time to get some hands-on experience.

Let's Make a Challenge!

We recommend you open a new window and try to follow along in creating this Challenge.

To walk you through the process, we are going to use a simple example, but this method can be applied to any type of Challenge. Today you are going to create a Challenge that asks advocates to read an article and provide feedback on it.

Objective (Why do you want to make this Challenge?)

We found an entertaining yet informative article about office hacks. We want to provide value for our members with a fun challenge that also brings some value to their lives.

Targeting (Who should see this Challenge)

This Challenge will use group targeting, so it only displays for employee advocates.

Creating our Challenge

Step 1. On the Challenges page, click the + Add New button.

If you select Templated Hub Challenge you'll be taken to the Challenge Template Library. Here we can choose from several preset templates that the Influitive team has setup. As this is a unique challenge, we won't be using a template. 

Step 2. To create a challenge from scratch, click on the Blank Challenge button or Blank Hub Challenge from the + Add New button. 

Step 3. Now it's time to fill out the settings for this Challenge.     

There are three sections of challenge creation -  Manage Challenge Settings, Add Stage, and Challenge Targeting. 

Within each section, there are a few tasks to complete. Let's go through each of those components now. 

Manage Challenge Settings

Challenge name: Name your Challenge. This name is administrator-facing and is used to identify your Challenge. We recommend putting the challenge type in square brackets ( [ ] ) to make reporting easier. We're going to call our challenge "[Feedback] 25 Office Hacks". 

Challenge type: Selecting the right type is essential. Consistent use of challenge types leads to better reporting on what kind of challenges your advocates are completing. Types are also useful as they easily allow advocates to get an idea of what kind of Challenge it is at a glance.

In our example, the challenge type will be "Feedback." You can use one of the preset types or create a new challenge type (by clicking the "Add New" button). 

Headline: The headline is your opportunity to grab the member's attention and entice them to click into a challenge. Your goal is to create headlines that are both clear and intriguing. If it's not clear what you want the member to do, they are less likely to complete the Challenge. If your headline is not engaging, advocates will pass over the Challenge. 

For our purposes, we will make our headline, "Have you tried any of these 25 office hacks?".  

Banner image: If you select "Choose Image," the window below will appear. The image you choose will appear on the challenge preview. You can do the following options to select the right image for your challenge:

1. Upload a file from your computer
2. Search and select an image from the web
3. Search and select Images from Unsplash, a royalty-free and high-quality image provider.
4. Insert a URL link of the image.
5. Lastly, use various cloud applications (e.g. Google Drive, Box, Facebook, or Instagram).

If you are not happy with the way the image is displayed, click on the Crop Image button below the challenge card preview to the right. It will allow you to crop the image to match the dimensions of the banner image perfectly.

Challenge description: The challenge description is where you elaborate on what advocates will be doing for a particular challenge. This description should be to the point, but also engaging. Don't make the description too lengthy and be sure to break up the sentences to avoid a "wall of text." 

Our description will be:

Being efficient is a pastime of ours. When we found these 25 office hacks, some of us wanted to put them into action immediately.

Check them out and tell us which you've used and what the results were.

Rank this Challenge: Ranking this Challenge will bring it to the top of the challenges page and generate extra traffic. You should identify if this Challenge will bring you a lot of value, or bring your member's a lot of value before featuring it. We suggest that you limit the number of ranked challenges to 3 ~ 5 since this will really allow them to make an impact. In my hub this Challenge will not add any special value, so I will not feature it.

Note: Channels will outrank challenges that are ranked as "1". Meaning if you have a Channel, the Challenge with a rank of "1" will appear after the Channel.

Multiple completions: Should this Challenge be completed multiple times? This option is best for value-adding challenges that cannot be abused by advocates to win excessive points. For our purposes, we will not allow multiple completions. 

Note: If you select the allow multiple completions option, you will have the option to limit the number of times that an advocate can complete this Challenge in a single calendar day

Adding Stages

Now that we have filled in all of the challenge overview details, we will create our stages. For more information about stages, please see this article. To do this, click on the "Add Stage" button on the top of the screen.

The Advocacy Picker is the first page an admin sees after they click "Add Stage" while creating a challenge. If an admin is not sure which advocacy type to pick yet, they can select the "Skip to stages >" option and fill it in later, and then they will be presented with all available stages. For the purpose of this exercise, we will click "Skip to stages >".

Note: If an admin decides to "Skip to stages >", the advocacy type will default to "None/Don't Report" unless the challenge stage has an advocacy type that is pre-selected. 

Step 4. Linking to the article

Our first stage is to Complete an action online (reading the article). This stage allows you to send advocates to a link. Click on this stage icon (seen below) to add it.

From here, you can customize your stage: 

Stage Name: Here you can select a stage name, or leave it as the default. We'll just leave this as default.

Stage Description: If you want to describe your stage or provide instructions for advocates you can do so here. This isn't always necessary.

Advocacy Type: The Advocacy Type which best reflects the activity in the stage.

Points for Stage: Points help motivate your advocates and should reflect the difficulty or business value of the Challenge. On the right of your screen, you will have the option to select how many points to award for each stage. You can set custom amounts for each stage. We will make this stage worth 50 points.

Link to Content: Each stage will have its own unique details to fill. This stage will require a link to the website you want to show. For the 25 office hacks article, we will use this link: http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20131022165909-5799319-25-office-hacks-you-need-to-know?trk=tod-home-art-list-large_0

Once you've put in a link and press load, you will be able to see the preview of the webpage that will be shown to your Advocates in the Challenge. 

Getting to the next stage: This is the text for the button which the member must click to advance to the next stage. This needs to be simple but engaging. Use action words like "I've read the blog post". 

Notification upon completion: Here you can enter custom text for the member to see once they finish the Challenge. For example: "Thanks for reading!"

Step 5. Feedback stage: It's time to get feedback! Add a new stage and select Questions.

Stage Name: We will leave the default stage name, "Questions".

Stage Description: Again, if you want to describe your stage for advocates you can do so here.

Points for Stage: This stage will offer another 50 points. 

Questions: Here you can write your question, choose a response type, and select if the field should be required. You can add a question by pressing the Add a question button. We have chosen our question text to be "Which hacks have you tried and what were the results? (Optional) ". Our response type is "Short Answer", and the question will not be required to complete the Challenge.

Make responses to this stage public: With public responses turned on you can encourage advocate-to-advocate socialization within a challenge. This field is specific to the Questions stage. Do you want responses to be shared with others in the Challenge? For fun challenges this is typically a good idea, so we will select this checkbox.

Getting to the next stage: We will leave this button with the default "Submit" text.

Notification upon completion: Our text for this is, "Hope you enjoyed the office hacks!"

Challenge Targeting 

Where would you like to display this Challenge?

The first step is to choose whether you want this Challenge to appear within a Channel, or on the main Challenges page (i.e. not in a Channel). 

Clicking on the dropdown will allow you to choose a Channel for this Challenge. If you do not intend to put it within a Channel, you may leave this menu in its default state, that is "- Select a Channel - (optional)".

Who would you like to see this Challenge?

Now we will walk through the targeting options available for each Challenge you created.

Target Nominees: If you have an Open Sign-up Hub, and your new members start as Nominees, you will want to decide whether or not these users should be able to see this Challenge. Check this option to allow them to see it.

Target Advocates: Choose this option every time unless you want this Challenge to only show to nominees because you are running an Open Sign-up Hub.

Exclude advocates that meet (any / all) of the following (max 10): Exclusion rules may be added the same way as inclusion rules and behave the same. It is important to note that exclusion rules always take precedence over inclusion rules.

Criteria for inclusion falls into these groups:

• Individuals: Specific advocates.
• Group: The member is in a specific group.
• Advocate Info: Criteria based on information about the advocate (e.g. Industry, Region, Title, etc.)
• Behaviour: How the member behaves in your hub (e.g. Engaged, Not Engaged, completed specific challenges, etc)
• Responses: Includes/Excludes advocates based on their response to a question. You can choose to segment an exact response or a response that contains a certain word. 
• Everyone:  All advocates in the hub. 

Step 7. And we're almost done! You can now preview your new Challenge to make sure everything is working. Once you've checked that everything looks good, you can go ahead and save the Challenge. 

Step 8. Publish the Challenge (make it visible to advocates): Once you have saved the Challenge, you will be able to publish it by clicking on the "Not Published" label (seen below the Challenge Name).

Once you click that link you will be able to adjust settings such as: limiting the Challenge to a certain number of participant completions, when to publish the Challenge, or when to unpublish the Challenge.

Once you've set those (if you need to), go ahead and publish!

Congratulations on creating your new Challenge!