Choosing the right tech platform for your challenge
One reason people are sometimes reluctant to launch their own challenges, is that they can be complicated from a technology point of view. While easiest way to launch a challenge is to post your challenge on Facebook or Instagram, you’ll be missing out on acquiring e-mails for potential leads. Social media also makes it difficult to assess engagement and completion rates. Generally speaking, social media functions as a “low-touch” medium where people don’t tend to spend a lot of time on a single post, much less committing to returning on a daily basis. Therefore, the best way to create your challenge is to create your own, reserving social media for participant acquisition (more on that in part IV).
However, challenges have a lot of technical requirements. You need sign-up and authentication. You will also require a platform to e-mail and communicate with your users. Finally, the most successful challenges leverage social community and communication amongst all the people participating in your challenge. That will require you to implement a method for users to post their comments, their check-ins, and potentially a chat board.
This could seem overpowering to all but the most tech savvy creators. Luckily there is a single source solution that makes this daunting task simple. ifUiWill is a platform built for you in mind. It is a platform that was built specifically for anyone who wants to create a challenge.
ifUiWill.com offers a free tier for anyone wanting to launch a simple challenge for under 10 people. Free users don’t have access to their user list, leaderboards, or e-mail management, but it does work for groups of friends who just want to commit to doing something together. It offers sign-up and login, daily check-ins, and chat. It also has a concept of “trust rating” which is a measurement of how often you complete your commitment and badges for completing the entire challenge.
Premium plans start at $14.99 per month! ifUiWill provides everything you need to launch a successful challenge to grow your e-mail list and attract qualified leads or followers to your organization.
With ifUiWill Premium you get:
Challenges with more than 10 participants. While the free version of ifUiWill limits the number of challenge participants to 10, ifUiWill premium allows unlimited number of challenge participants.
Challenge Management. ifUiWill Premium allows you to manage your challenges. You block users, edit your challenges, and appoint moderators.
E-mail communications. ifUiWill Premium allows you to send e-mail to your challenge participants or anyone who has joined your challenges in the past. It also allows you to download a complete list of challenge participants in a CSV file, thereby growing your e-mail list for your ongoing marketing efforts.
Evergreen Challenges. Challenges are a powerful tool for growing your e-mail list. While some challenges have a specific start and end date, it is often useful to have challenges that are always active. Evergreen challenges do not have a specific start and end date. They start the day the users join and end when the milestones have been completed. With every milestone, the participants get to see those that have completed that milestone before them.
One-sided challenges. The free version of ifUiWill only allows two sided challenges. The challenge creator either must complete the same challenge or do something in return. One-sided challenges are made for influencers, coaches, teaches, or organization who simply want to create a challenge for their followers.
Leaderboard. If you would like your challenge to be a contest and to track performance as the challenge continues, ifUiWill premium gives you the ability to create a leaderboard to track your performance.
Teams. Do you have a challenge to be completed in teams? ifUiWill Premium give you the ability to create a teams challenge that allows groups to compete against each other. Team members also get access to the “Locker Room” which is a chat room dedicated only to members of their teams.
Donations. Raising money for a good cause? ifUiWill Premium allows users to sponsor a challenge? Whether is a walk-a-thon, weight loss contest, litter collecting, or any other types of challenges, your participants can donate based on your challenge’s performance.
Analytics. ifUiWill Premium gives you the data to understand how your challenge is trending. You can see your engagement rate, completion rate, visits per day and lots of other useful data.
Challenge content will be delivered to your users on the appropriate day and in the appropriate time zone. IfUiWill requires that participants check-in after a with their completed task as required and even give you the opportunity to accept or reject the check-in. It also includes chat and DM. Finally, posting your challenge on ifUiWill provides an opportunity to attract additional users looking for challenges through the ifUiWill app.
To sign up for an ifUiWill Premium account, you must go the ifUiWill website. Your participants can also you the iOS or Android application to check in, but management of your Premium challenge can only be done through the website.
To create a new challenge, click on the New Challenge button on the home screen.
Premium Members can also go the “Challenge Management” tab on the left side of the screen. Here you will find all challenges you have created.
If you have yet to create any challenges, you can create one by pressing the “New Challenge” button.
Start by entering the title of your challenge. In the description field, enter a detailed description of what your challenge is about and the value you will offer. This is your opportunity to sell potential participants on the value of joining your challenge. You may also choose to create some hashtags that participants using the ifUiWill app may use to discover your challenge.
ifUiWill also offer challenges that are “team challenges”. These are challenges where groups of people that compete against each other. For our purposes, we will not be using this feature, so you should choose “No”.
You will be asked to choose a cover image for you challenge. It is important that you choose an image that of high quality and highly related to the challenge you create. The image will be the first thing a potential participant sees when deciding whether to join your challenge. It will also be the image user see when you or your participants share this challenge on social media, so choose wisely.
Now is time to set the terms of your challenge. What are they signing up for? Remember, challenges are an accountability tool. Be clear on what you expect from your participants.
You can choose to allow everyone to join your challenge or lock it, only allowing those whom you invite to participate. For your purposes, you want as many people to join your challenge as possible, so leave it unlocked.
Some challenges are only available during certain dates, while others allow users to join at any time and are always available.
These “Evergreen” challenges are useful if you are trying to build up your e-mail list. For example if you have a 1-week challenge with a daily check-in, your participant will start day 1 on the day they join. They will also see check-ins that previous participants did on that first day. The challenge will send after the 7th day. If you want your challenge to have a discrete beginning and end, then you can explicitly set those dates.
Then set the frequency. This is how often your participants will check in. Is it a daily challenge, weekly challenge, or is it just one single check-in?
There are lots of different types of challenges. There are challenges where the creator and the participants all do the same thing. There are challenges where if someone completes your challenge you will do something different in return. Perhaps you will provide them with a couple to your course, or a t-shirt. Finally, there is the kind of challenge that is just one-sided. This type of challenge is good if your challenge is more like a course.
When you have completed your ifUiWill challenge, it will be live on the site (unless you have set it to private). Now you can share a link to the challenge to your landing page and your social media. We will cover that in part IV of this series.
If you missed the first two parts, you can find them here:
Part I: Why Do Challenges Matter?
Part II: Planning Your Challenge Content
