Create your first Challenge

Introduction

This tutorial teaches you Challenge essentials such as general settings, forms, stages, and extras. You’ll create your first Challenge and learn how to build a workflow to manage submitted Ideas.

In this tutorial, you will:

Before you start

Before you start the tutorial, there are a few things to check:

You must have permission to create a Challenge by being a platform, Idea Space, or Co-creation Community Admin or Manager.
You have created a Challenge Idea form for both Idea submission and Idea development.
You have completed the Challenge planning checklist.

Step 1: Create a blank Challenge

The first thing we’ll do is create a blank Challenge. When you create a blank Challenge, you’ll be presented with the Challenge builder, where you can configure every part of your Challenge.

Go to your platform home page.
Select Create > Challenge.
Under Start building your Challenge, select Create a blank challenge.

Step 2: Configure the general settings

Now that you have a blank Challenge, you can start configuring your Challenge.

On the General tab, select Title and description.
For Title, enter the name of your Challenge.
For Description, enter a description for your Challenge.
Next, select the Types and keywords tab.
For Keywords, enter one or more keywords that might be relevant to your Challenge.

With this done, you’ve completed all the required settings to move on from the General tab. However, while on the same tab you can also:

Step 3: Select your forms

When someone wants to add an Idea to your Challenge, they’ll need to complete a form. You can include multiple forms in your Challenge, and decide at which stage a form is needed.

On the Forms tab, look for the Avaliable forms list.
Select one or more forms you want to use. e.g. a form for Idea submissions and another for updating Ideas in development.

Step 4: Build a Challenge workflow

Now that you’ve completed the basics and selected your forms, the next step is to build the Challenge workflow using stages.

The standard workflow should include a stage for gathering, evaluating, and developing your ideas. So that’s what we’ll build. By default, you should already have a stage for “Gather” and “Completed”, so we can skip those.

On the Forms tab, under Workflow, select Add stage.
For the primary action, select Evaluate Ideas.
Under Select form, select the form you’ll use to collect Ideas.
Select Add stage again, and now select Develop Ideas.
Configure the settings for each stage to your liking.

You should now have a stage called “Gather”, “Evaluate”, “Develop”, and “Completed”. By default, each stage will already be configured to use the correct settings for the stage type. e.g. A gather stage will allow Idea submissions, whereas an evaluation stage will only allow evaluations to be completed.

Step 5: Add any optional extras

If you want to add extra features to your Challenge, such as a rating system, private messages, gamification, or recommendations, you can do so on the Extras tab. For our example, we’ll add a rating system.

On the Extras tab, click the Plus and select Rating system.
Configure the type of rating system, who can see it, and the details shown.

This way people can now vote on the Ideas submitted to our Challenge.

Step 6: Manage dashboard visibility

Now we need to decide which users or groups can see the analytics dashboard for the Challenge.

On the Dashboard tab, select a dashboard.
Under Manage access, select a user group, or type someone’s name in the search field and then select the user.

Step 7: Publish your Challenge

In this final step, you will publish your Challenge so it’s live and ready to accept Idea submissions.

Check you have no required* settings remaining for your Challenge settings.
Select Publish.

Conclusion

By completing this tutorial, you've learned to create a basic Challenge.

As part of that, we've learned how to:

Next steps

Monitor your Challenge for new Idea submissions and progress these Ideas through each stage of your workflow.
If you want to practice the skills you've learned in this tutorial again, try creating another Challenge, but this time save it as a draft.
In the next tutorial, Create your first Idea Space, you'll learn how to create an Idea Space.