When considering an annual wellness program versus a single step challenge, we frequently cover the concept of Featured Challenges.
TL;DR – Featured Challenges are “marquee” challenges that are aimed at getting everyone in your program to join and engage. Standard Challenges are supplemental challenges that can be aimed at smaller groups or private subsets of an organization. Annual programs can run several featured challenges in a year.
While these topics are covered in the admin onboarding process, understanding Featured Challenges helps decide if an annual program is right for you, so we’re doing a quick explainer here.
What is a Featured Challenge?
Featured challenges are admin-run challenges. They have special features such as:
- Milestone pins are emailed
- New users are automatically added to the featured challenge
- They show up at the top of the Challenges page
- Admins can restrict members to only joining ONE of them. Called “Restricted Joining”
- If ‘restricted joining’ is on, users will only be able to join one featured challenge
- If there is more than one featured challenge for individuals, post registration a ‘challenge chooser’ will show, asking them to choose which challenge
- If a user is already in a featured challenge and restricted joining is on: They will be able to join another featured challenge if the first featured challenge is within ten days of ending.
What is a Standard (non-featured) Challenge?
Non-featured challenges are created by admins, team leaders, or members that are not placed front-and center like a Featured Challenge.
These challenges can be run alongside featured challenges, kept private among participants, and can be limited to subdivisions within a larger organization.
During challenge setup, you have the option to create it as a “featured” challenge. When would you want to define a challenge as featured?
You would define a challenge as featured if it will be the program’s main, site-wide, challenge. When pulling stats you will be able to select the challenge from the “Challenges Stats” drop-down easily since it defaults to showing only Featured challenge. It also highlights the challenge in teal when they visit the Challenges tab making it more prominent if they are in several challenges. Map milestone emails are sent for Featured challenges (as long as member has not turned those off in member preferences section).
NOTE: If a challenge is open and featured, but set to private, new registrants still get added automatically. If a featured challenge is not open, they will not be added at registration.
NEW PROGRAMS: Making it featured makes it easy on the admin and PM because every time a person registers they are automatically added to the challenge (for individual challenges).
NEW PROGRAM TEAM CHALLENGE: If this will be a team challenge that is featured, people will not be auto added until you add those participants to teams and then add the teams to the challenge. The only way with a featured team challenge for a person to be auto-added would be that you have already created teams, added them to the challenge, and at registration a person selects which team they want to join. Then, they would be automatically added.
EXISTING PROGRAMS: If this is not a program’s initial challenge, setting it as featured will not automatically add everyone. You will still need to either invite or add members or teams.
Multiple Featured Challenges
Turnkey programs are limited to one featured challenge at a time and cannot create a future featured challenge while there is an active featured challenge (this includes the tally reporting time at the end of a challenge 48-52 hours). Annual Turnkey programs running back-to-back challenges can contact customer success to schedule ahead in these rare cases. On the day that the challenge should start, the admin writes in to request that this challenge be made featured.