Running weekly and/or monthly challenges

Weekly and/or monthly challenges are one of the best ways to keep your users engaged and feeling excited about your program. Whether you’re running a monthly steps challenge for a corporate wellness initiative or asking your sales team to complete a week-long training, we’ve got you covered!

This week, we show you the best practices for setting up and structuring your challenge on Nudge, share some ideas for how to report results, and make you an expert on our leaderboard feature. 

Weekly and Monthly Challenges

A challenge is a great way to boost motivation with your users and add value to your existing programs. Let’s start with this: 

What is a challenge?

A challenge is a themed experience combining education with a defined goal. And if you’re using Nudge, a challenge uses a Tracker to show progress with the Goal, as well as a Leaderboard to show how each user is doing.

This might be hosted by a business to incentivize wellness with their employees, or by you, as a coach, as a lead capture or to reset your clients’ dedication. 

In Nudge you can set up 2 basic challenges: weekly and monthly.

Weekly challenges are great for lead captures. It’s a taste of your content, personality as a coach, and services without a major (or any) buy-in.  

For example, offering a free steps challenge will get prospective clients engaging with you, and by adding a call to action at the end, there’s a great possibility of converting those participants into paying clients.

Week-long challenges don’t typically require much work on the coach’s part. The goal doesn’t have to be one that is considered sustainable in the long term. It can be thought of more as a “jumpstart”.  

A few examples are going plant based, doing a sales call sprint, or journaling one page a day.

Monthly challenges are a little different. 

You might want to consider charging something for these, so your users have some skin in the game. Having a coach or community moderator will be very helpful in keeping participants engaged for the full month.

Choose something that is more sustainable here. For example, adding one serving of vegetables a day, one sales call per day, or journaling one sentence per day.

A leaderboard is a great addition to both weekly and monthly challenges. A few best practices to consider are: 

1. Using metrics that are inclusive and fair competition for your audience (i.e. a 350 pound person and a 150 pound person are going to be expected to drink different amounts of water). 
2. Making it manageable (depending on your audience).  Meditating for an hour every day undoubtedly has a lot of benefits, but is it realistic for your audience? Consider starting smaller at least for your initial challenge, and you can always run a “mega meditators” challenge later on for folks who can go the 60 minutes.
3. Letting your participants feel they are winning no matter what the leaderboard says.  Maybe a couple of your participants were able to only send in one job application today, but the leaderboard is showing someone sent in 15.  One is still better than none, and make sure those participants feel that win.

[Feb 8, 2022]