In the ever-evolving landscape of community building, Nas.io stands as a beacon of innovation, constantly striving to provide cutting-edge tools for community managers (CMs) to foster engagement and growth within their communities. Today, we're thrilled to unveil our latest feature: Challenges.
Challenges are time-bound experiences where participants can complete some activities or assignments over one or more sub-periods of time called checkpoints, to reach a shared goal, all designed by the community host.
4-week beginner fitness challenge
Week 1 (Checkpoint 1)
Do 3 moderate body-weight exercises and 1 moderate cardio exercise.
Week 2 (Checkpoint 2)
Do 3 moderate weight lifting exercises.
Week 3 (Checkpoint 3)
Do 3 light body-weight exercises and 1 high-intensity exercise.
Week 4 (Checkpoint 4)
Do 3 heavy weight-lifting exercises and 1 light cardio exercise..
However, more than just tasks or activities; challenges are dynamic opportunities for community host to ignite excitement, encourage participation, and cultivate a sense of camaraderie among their community members. With Challenges, community host can take their community engagement to new heights by offering structured, gamified and rewarding experiences tailored to their unique audience.
What sets Nas.io apart from others?
It is our unwavering commitment to empowering CMs with the tools they need to succeed. Challenges on Nas.io are designed to seamlessly integrate into existing community structures, allowing CMs to effortlessly create, manage, and track progress within their challenges.
Through Challenges, CMs can:
1. Foster Community Connection: Challenges spark meaningful connection among community members with a shared goal. Whether it's a fitness challenge, book reading marathon, or mindfulness journey, participants connect, support each other, and achieve together.
2. Drive Engagement: Challenges make community activities fun by turning them into gamified experiences. This encourages members to actively participate and stay involved in the community's goals, earning rewards along the way.
3. Promote Accountability: CMs can track participants' progress and offer feedback and encouragement, fostering a sense of responsibility and commitment among members.
4. Encourage Growth: Challenges aren't just about finishing tasks; they're about personal growth. CMs can create challenges that align with their community's values, offering opportunities for learning, exploration, and development.
Dive into this guide to know how to create these experiences for your community
Quick start guide for setting up a challenge
1 - Login to your Nas.io portal as a manager.
2 - Select Challenges [new]
3 - On the Challenge List page
Create a challenge from scratch by clicking Create Challenge, or click on any templates that you find suitable. This will open up the Challenge Creation sidesheet
Creating a challenge from template will auto generate the challenge schedule and checkpoint structure based on checkpoint duration (day, week, month) and challenge duration. The start date of the challenge will be one day from now.
4 - On Challenge Creation
You would need to fill out the following:
Challenge Title (Name of the challenge)
Cover image
Pricing (Fixed/Flexible)
Add Discount (If it is a paid challenge)
Duration (Fixed dates/Always on)
5 - In Setting up Challenge duration
You have the option to set your challenge on "Fixed dates" or "Always on"
For Fixed dates:
You can select how long the challenge will run using the suggested duration or customize it and the start and end date coverage will adjust accordingly.
Select Checkpoint duration for the challenge
It's up to you to choose daily, weekly, or custom duration for your checkpoints.
For custom checkpoints, you would need to enter the duration of the checkpoints. In this case, we selected 2 days for each checkpoint and the system will automatically create 3 checkpoints in total for you since the challenge we set is for 7 days.
Once done, click on the "next" button
On the next page, you will see the option to set when is your checkpoints going to be. You can set it to be:
Daily
Weekly
Monthly
Custom
Checkpoint start & end strictly follow the specified checkpoint duration.
For example, for a 30-day weekly challenge, there will be 4 checkpoints, 7 days each. For the remaining 2 days, the challenge will still be ongoing and participants can still make late submissions to the last checkpoint.
For Always on:
The challenge begins when a member joins, and checkpoints are unlocked based on their join date. Please note that this setting cannot be changed later.
Once you filled out the relevant information to create your challenge, click on Create Challenge at the top right corner of the page.
A challenge will be created with Draft status and you will be redirected to Challenge Overview page
Note: You cannot change a fixed date challenge to always on challenge or vice versa once you click on Create Challenge
6 - On Challenge Overview page
You can see various clickable information that will open up the corresponding page/sidesheet where you can add/edit the information required
Fill up checkpoints
Configure sales page
Add an upsell
Publish
The minimum setup to publish the challenge is its schedule and checkpoints.
7 - Fill up Checkpoints.
On Checkpoint page, you can optionally add more content, instructions or submission requirements to each checkpoint.
Title (Title name of the checkpoint E.g Challenge Week 7)
Add Cover Video
Descriptions (if you would like to add more written description and requirements for your checkpoint, you can add it here)
Attachments (Upload file/Add link)
Submission form (Participants will have to fill up the form to complete the checkpoint)
For more information about this submission form, go to How to collect submissions for a checkpoint
On this page you also have the option to:
Edit checkpoint dates:
Fixed dates: You will have the option to change the start date of the specific checkpoint you are editing. You can only set it to a date prior the challenge end date.
Always on: You will have the option to set is as:
[Default] Unlocks immediately
Unlock the checkpoint on a specific number days after the participants joined the challenge
You can see the preview of the challenge by clicking on the eye icon.
You can duplicate the checkpoint you created to another checkpoint available in your challenge. Tick on the checkpoints where you would like to copy the details of the checkpoint you have created and the select "Duplicate"
9 - After these steps, your challenge has had a time-bound structure (depending on the duration you set: Fixed dates/ Always on) and is ready to be published, where people can start signing up for your challenge.
10 - If you want to make the sales page more attractive, continue to the next section.
Otherwise, go to How to publish your challenge right away.
You can also explore all the configurable options by clicking on this gear icon
Configure challenge sales page
The sales page of a challenge has the following structure
Preview Page
Details: You can add/edit the following:
Challenge title
Cover image
featured video
Challenge Page URL
Description: the main place to describe / advertise your challenge
Host (Only existing admins of the community can be set as challenge host)
Pricing & Access:
Change pricing
You can also set here if you will allow participants to join after challenge starts or not.
Sales Page:
Challenge Instructions (optional): here you can specify in detail how to participate in your challenge
Rewards (optional): here you can specify in detail rewards you offer for your challenge
Group Chat: If you have a dedicated chat group for the challenge you can set it up here but it is optional.
More Options:
Enable Challenge Feed
If toggled on, the participants must complete each checkpoint in order to progress
Sequential unlocking
if toggled On, the participants must complete checkpoints in order.
Limit access after challenge ends
if toggled On, it will restrict participants from completing any remaining checkpoints after the challenge ends.
While cover image is mandatory, cover video is optional. If cover video is available, it will be auto-played at the same position of the cover image. While the video is being loaded, the cover image will be displayed.
To edit the Instructions or Rewards, expand the More options section
Connect challenge to a group chat
Having an external group chat is great for your participants to interact with each other.
1 - Under Configure Sales Page, Expand Group chat on the list
2 - Specify the group chat link and click Save.
Publish your challenge
If you are ready to invite people to join the challenge, it's time to publish it.
Before publishing the challenge, it's better to review the access of the challenge
1 - Click on the gear icon at the top of the navigation bar.
2 - Expand Pricing & Access section and edit the information.
3 - Edit the access (free / paid) and add any discount codes if necessary.
Additionally you can choose to allow participants to join after the challenge starts or not. By default, this setting is set to false.
4 - Click Save
5 - On Challenge Overview page, click on Publish.
Broadcast to your audiences the Challenge public page link or Challenge checkout link (for faster checkout experience).
Voila! Congratulations on setting up your Challenge Product on Nas.io 🥳
Setup your checkpoint details
How to collect submissions for a checkpoint
1 - On Checkpoint Edit page, click on Submission form
2 - Add one or more questions as requirements for participants to complete the checkpoint.
There are 4 types of input supported: free text, file doc, image and video
For video submission, the max duration is 90s.
Submission questions of a checkpoint cannot be modified if at least one participant has completed the checkpoint
How to duplicate the details of one checkpoint to others
This functionality is helpful for routine-based challenges, where the details of several checkpoints need to be the same. The following information will be populated from a source checkpoint to all destination checkpoints
Cover video
Description
Submission questions
1 - On Checkpoint Edit modal, navigate to the source checkpoint
2 - Click Duplicate
3 - Select the destination checkpoints and click Duplicate
Submission questions of a checkpoint cannot be modified if at least one participant has completed the checkpoint.
Configure challenge leaderboard
❗Only available for Fixed dates challenge
Leaderboard is an effective way to gamify the experience even more.
Currently, we provide a simple point-earning and ranking mechanism where the faster participants complete a checkpoint, the more points they will earn. Participants will be ranked by the accumulated points from all checkpoints.
Point mechanism
Maximum points to earn is 1000 per checkpoints.
Minimum points to earn for completing a checkpoint on time is 500.
Late completions earn 250 points.
How to turn on leaderboard
1 - Go to Checkpoints tab
2 - Click on Leaderboard, then click Turn on
You can turn on or off leaderboard at any moment. Points will always be captured, so the moment you turn it on, points and ranks will be displayed to participants.
3- Once turned on, on member portal, Participant tab will become Leaderboard tab
Challenge feed
You can configure a dedicated feed for your challenge. Challenge feed will be generated from the checkpoint completions and submissions of participants. Every time a participant completes a checkpoint, a feed entry will be posted on the challenge feed. Participants can optionally include a caption and also the submission answers in the feed entry.
At the minimum state, the challenge feed is a checkpoint completion activity log, which adds strong gamification and togetherness elements into the challenge.
With caption, submission answers, reaction and comments, the challenge feed can provide many opportunities for everyone in the challenge to support, celebrate and interact with each other.
At the moment, no one can manually post on the challenge feed
By default, the challenge feed is enabled
Configure challenge feed
1 - Click on the Gear icon
2 - Expand More Option section and toggle on the Enable Challenge Feed toggle
3 - Once toggled on, a new tab on the nas.io all will be available
Managing challenge feed
As a Community Manager, you can
Delete a feed entry
Hide feed entry content
The caption and submission items will be hidden from the feed entry
The author of the feed entry will be able to see the reason on the feed itself
Challenge participants can also edit their feed entry anytime to update the caption or hide or show their submission answers.
Join a challenge
After a challenge has been published, it's time for your participants to join the challenge
As a non nas.io user
Any public user can register your challenge via the Public page link or the Checkout link of the challenge.
Public users can only join a challenge in this way if it hasn't started.
As a community member
1 - On Web or App, on Member Portal (MP), click on Challenges, which will open up Challenge List page
2 - Click on the challenge card you want to join, which will open up the Public page of the challenge on a new tab, where the member can go through the standard registration process.
Community members can only join a challenge in this way if it hasn't started.
Add a participant manually
A community manager can add any existing community member (including himself/herself) to a challenge.
This method will bypass the checkout process.
1 - On Challenge Overview, clicks on Participant tab
2 - Click on the Add Participant icon on the right-hand side
3 - Search for community members using email or name
4 - Click Confirm to add them to the challenge directly.
Participate in a challenge
Participant can participate via web browser or via the nas.io app.
Challenge is best to participate on App!
There are 3 ways a participant can access a challenge
After checkout
1 - After checkout out successfully
Click Go to Challenge to access the challenge on browser
Alternatively, ccanning the QR code using your phone will either
Open the App store for you to download the app if you haven't
Open the challenge on the app directly if you already have the app installed.
From Member Portal
1 - On Member Portal (MP), click on Challenges, which will open up Challenge List page.
2 - Click on any challenge that you have joined to start participating.
From challenge welcome email
1- In challenge welcome email, click on either Participate on App or Participate on Browser to access the challenge
Participate in a challenge
How can a participant complete a checkpoint
1 - On member portal My Progress tab, a participant will always see the current checkpoint
If the challenge is not step-by-step unlocking, the current checkpoint will always be the ongoing checkpoint.
If the challenge is step-by-step unlocking, the current checkpoint is the first checkpoint that the participant has not completed.
2 - Click on Continue now to go to the checkpoint details and complete it.
3 - If leaderboard is turned on, participant will be able to see the points earned and the new rank achieved
How can a participant join challenge chat group
1 - Click on Participants tab, then click on Join Chat
Managing Challenge Participants
To track participations, on CMP, click on Participants tab.
In the Participants tab, you should see the following details:
# of Participants
Search for a participant using their name or email address
Export the list of participants
Add a participant to the challenge
Send them a message via Magic Reach
There are 3 different statuses of a checkpoint
Incomplete: participant has not completed the checkpoint
Completed: participant completed the checkpoint on time
Late completed: participant completed the checkpoint late
Overall checkpoint completion tracking
A column corresponds to the completion status of a checkpoint.
1 - To filter completion status by checkpoints, click on Filters
2 - Select the checkpoints and status to filter by
3 - Click Show results
4 - If leaderboard is turned on, columns indicating participants' rank and points will be available
Details of each completion
Clicking on any member will bring up the Participant Activities sidesheet showing the details of his/her participation, where you can view submission of each checkpoint.
If leaderboard is turned on, points earned by each checkpoint will also be available.
How to mark someone as failed the challenge
If a participant fails to meet the criteria of the challenge, you have an option to mark his/her as failed.
1 - On Participant Activities sidesheet, click on the three-dot menu
2 - Click on Mark as Failed
3 - Specify the reason and click Confirm
Marked as failed participant will still be able to access the challenge and all the checkpoints he/she has completed.
However, he/she will not be able to access any subsequent checkpoints. He/she will also stop receiving email notification when each checkpoint starts
How to declare winners
Certain challenges might have winners with attractive prizes, which can boost participation significantly.
You can declare participants as winner after the challenge has ended
1 - Once the challenge has ended, click on Participants tab, you will see the summary of the challenge
2 - Click on Declare winners
3 - Search by email or name and add participants as winner, then click Confirm
4 - Email will be sent out to winners
How participants can share their challenge results
After a challenge ends, participants can share their results to the world.
1 - As a participant, access the ended challenge on nas.io App
2 - You will be able to see your result of the challenge
There are 3 possible results
Winner: declared by community manager
Completed: completed all checkpoints
Participated: didn't complete all checkpoints
3 - Click on Share your achievement, and share the result (as an image) to the world.
Duplicate a challenge
Your challenge is a success, and there are many more potential people might want to join such experience. Duplicate a challenge to save 99% of your effort to regenerate 100% of the success
1 - On Challenge Overview page, click on the three-dot menu
2 - Click Duplicate
3 - A new challenge will be created and you will be redirected to it
New challenge will have the following information
<source challenge title> Copy
Start date to be 1 day from now
Challenge duration, checkpoint duration and checkpoint information will be the same as the source challenge
To know more about the participant's experience with Challenges, you may click on this link for reference.
Frequently Asked Questions:
How do I remove a participant from a challenge?
How do I remove a participant from a challenge?
Currently, the only way for a participant to be removed from the challenge is by Marking them as failed.
You can do this by going through the challenge participants > click on the participant > on the 3 dots across their name > select Mark as failed:
Select the relevant reason why you are marking them as failed:
Please note that they will receive an email advising that they have failed the challenge along with the reason why you have marked them as failed.
If you have any suggestions on how we can improve this functionality, feel free to send us a message at help@nas.io with an email subject: "Feedback on Challenge Feature" so we can direct your request to our product team.