One-time Challenge Best Practices

Follow these best practice tips for running a successful onetime challenge.

MoveSpring Team avatar
Written by MoveSpring Team
Updated over a week ago

A one-time challenge is a great way to kick-off your organization’s wellness journey. Our one-time challenge plan gives you access to the platform for 45 days in length. For your challenge, you’ll get access to the admin center, content library, and all of our challenge modes for an engaging, fun user experience.

Define your “Why”

Identifying your “why” is the the first and most critical step when it comes to running a challenge. The “why” is your goal. Clearly defined goals provide direction, focus, and keep your users motivated because they know what they’re working towards. Your 'why' also determines how you’ll structure and measure progress for the rest of your challenge.

Common goals include:

  • Team building

  • Connection

  • Collaboration

  • Competition

  • Morale

  • Get users up and moving

*Not sure what your “why” is?

Ask your users! Asking for feedback to establish your “why” is a great way to get users excited, especially when it’s something they care about! What goals would they like to focus on and what would be engaging to the group as a whole?

Planning and Setting Up your Challenge

Successful onetime challenges are simple, straightforward, and structured to reinforce the overarching goal. Overcomplicating your challenge can quickly become overwhelming and difficult to follow and manage. That’s why we recommend prioritizing simplicity and focusing on your “why” as this ensures the best user experience, which in turn increases motivation and engagement!

Duration

We recommend keeping onetime challenges to one month or 30 days maximum in duration. This gives users enough time to familiarize themselves with the platform, but prevents boredom and burnout. If you do opt for the full 45 days then make sure you have a strong communication strategy to keep users engaged and interested for the entire challenge. We suggest adding weekly raffles or mini-challenges via announcements to help keep things fresh!

Theme

Themes are a great way to keep challenges fresh and engaging. These should also support your overall goal! Popular themes include nutrition, stress management, meditation, and team building. For more ideas on how to create a themed step challenge, click here.

Challenge Structure

Once you know your theme, length, and overall goal, you can start setting up your challenge! Remember to keep it simple so users can easily follow and participate. We recommend having 2-4 modes in each challenge. The most successful challenges have a mixture of competitive modes and individual goal modes, and always include content. You can use the content mode to send healthy resources, post mini-challenges, or even get creative by highlighting a photo posted in chat as the ‘Photo of the Week’. This helps users stay consistent, engaged and feel more motivated.

Common challenge structures

  1. Team Leaderboard + Leaderboard + Streak + Actionable Content

  2. Virtual Race + Stick to it! + Content

  3. Streak (Personalized Range) + Leaderboard + Actionable Content

Rewards

Rewards are a great way to boost participation and increase awareness. We recommend using a combination of participation and outcome based rewards that support the main goal, but also celebrate the smaller wins! Fun fact: research shows that small, short-term incentives may be even more powerful in increasing healthy habits in the long-term.

How to reward users

  • Weekly raffles are a popular option for onetime challenges.

    This also works for groups with a wide activity range as it provides more opportunities for users to win!

  • Focus on all users, not just top movers

    For example: recognize consistency, engagement, most improved, personal bests!

  • Get creative with content and reporting

    Look at most active on Thursdays, “chattiest”, best group photo, favorite walking buddy, etc.

Learn more here on how to setup your rewards structure, prize ideas, and best practices!

Communication

Having a robust communication strategy is crucial for running a successful onetime challenge. Knowing what to communicate, when, and where helps users easily follow and track the challenge!

To communicate with users, you can use our chat, content, or announcements feature in the app. Read more on our best practices on communicating with users here.

After the challenge ends

Conduct a survey

We recommend conducting a survey after your challenge to gauge users’ interest and level of engagement! This measures users’ interests, engagement, and helps them have more of a say in future wellness initiatives at your organization.

Sample questions:

  1. What did you like about the MoveSpring challenge?

  2. What type of challenge would you like to see next?

  3. Would you participate in the next MoveSpring challenge?

Decide on when to host your next challenge

Most clients host quarterly challenges (4x/year) allowing breaks in between to give time for their members to rest and recoup. This gives you time to build out strong and personalized communication and engagement strategies for each challenge.

Not ready for your program to end? Reach out to your client success rep to keep the fun all year long with one of our annual plans!

Did this answer your question?