How to create an Endurance Challenge

Endurance Challenges is a great way to bring out fundraisers' best effort by engaging them in an endurance activity to help boost their advocacy and, in turn, increase their fundraising.

Planning

Before you configure your Endurance Challenge, you will want to plan your challenge. In this process, you should identify:

1. Your challenge name. This name will be used across the site where displaying users' progress. 
2. What types of activities you will challenge your fundraisers to do. There are some system defaults (walk, run, bike, swim, hike), but you can add any activity type you wish. Additionally, you'll want to decide if participants should be able to import activities from available fitness apps.
3. What goal your fundraisers will track progress towards. You can choose distance (e.g., miles), duration (measured in hours and minutes), or any custom metric.
4. Whether to allow endurance pledges for this challenge, where donors can pledge and donate an amount per unit of activity completed.

Here are some examples of Endurance Challenge ideas (system defaults for both activity types and progress tracking are italicized):

As you can see, so long as you've defined name, activity types, and what to track progress towards, you can configure virtually any challenge you can think of — the sky is the limit!

Configuration

Once you've worked out all the details, you're ready to configure your Endurance Challenge. To do so, follow these steps:

1. Log in to the Admin at admin.rallybound.com
2. Navigate to the entity (organization, group, or campaign) on which you'd like to configure this setting.
   • Note: this configuration is inherited, so if a challenge is enabled on the organization or group level, it will implement on every campaign within the organization or group. This is useful for event series that perform the same activity across many events (for example, a national walk series), but otherwise it is generally recommended to configure challenges on the campaign level. Click here to learn more about inherited settings.
   • If a challenge has been configured on a parent level, the Endurance Challenges section will show as locked (as is always the case when inheriting a configuration). To override the inherited configuration, click the lock icon and then "Override parent". This overrides the entire parent configuration (challenge name, activity types, progress, etc.) and replaces it with no challenges, at which point you are able to create a new challenge. If a parent was overridden in error, simply click the unlocked icon and then "Clear override". 
3. Click the "Fundraising" tab
4. Click "Endurance Challenges"
5. Click the "Create Endurance Challenge" button
6. Enter the Challenge name
7. Select and/or enter the activity types that fundraisers will be able to log. You can choose from Rallybound's defaults or enter your own. When doing the latter, type your activity name and press tab or enter so that it recognizes the activity.
   • Note: You can enter as many activities as you like, however keep in mind that they all need to work towards the same goal. For example, fundraisers cannot both read and walk towards a "steps" goal, so try not to create a challenge that includes both these activity types towards a "steps" goal.
   • If the challenge is configured such that participants can import activities from connected fitness apps (see #9 below), the allowed activity types will affect what activity types are available to import from the connected fitness app: if multiple types are allowed, participants will be presented with a multi-select dropdown from which they can choose which allowed activity types they want to import.
8. Choose whether fundraisers will be able to add their own activity types.
   • Tip: if the challenge tracks progress towards a custom metric, it is recommended to not allow fundraisers to add their own activity type, or you may end up with undesired combinations, for example walking 50 pages.
   • If the challenge is configured such that participants can import activities from connected fitness apps (see #9 below), enabling this option will allow participants to import any activity type supported by the connected app, regardless of the activities allowed in step #7 above.
9. If participants should be able to automatically import activities from a connected fitness app, choose the fitness apps for which a connection should be available.
   1. Available integrations are Strava and Boundless Motion. Strava can be enabled in all instances. To configure the Boundless Motion integration, please contact our support team.
   2. There is an additional option here to disallow participants from entering activities manually, which means they can only import activities from their connected app. With this option enabled, participants are also prevented from deleting activities. To delete an activity, participants should delete the relevant activity in the app from which it was imported. The Endurance Challenge will then remove those deleted activities.
10. Choose what the challenge should track progress towards. Your options here are:
    • Duration
    • Distance
    • Steps
      • Note that if fitness app imports are enabled, this option may not be available. This is to ensure that the metrics of the imported activities and progress tracking are aligned.
    • Calories (burned)
    • Other
      • Enter a custom metric, should be worded in the singular ("Lap", not "Laps")
      • Note that this option is not available if fitness app imports are enabled. This is to ensure that the metrics of the imported activities and progress tracking are aligned.
11. Choose whether and how to display distance and duration
    • Distance Display Options
      • Miles
      • Kilometers
      • Meters
      • Hide (only available if distance is not selected as the metric towards which to track progress)
      • Note: This can be changed for active challenges, however amounts may become slightly inaccurate due to rounding differences.
    • Duration Display Options:
      
      • Time (e.g., 1:30)
      • Minutes (e.g., 90)
      • Hours (e.g., 1.5)
      • Hours and Minutes (e.g., 1h 30m)
      • Hide (only available if duration is not selected as the metric towards which to track progress)
12. Define goal amounts for the campaign, for teams, and for individual fundraisers. Fundraisers can change their own goal, as can team captains for their team goal.
    • Note: Activity logged by a fundraiser will count towards their own goal, will aggregate to their team's goal, and ultimately up to the larger campaign goal.
13. Determine whether the challenge should have an end date, and set the end date.
    • Note: if an endurance challenge has an end date, the fundraising page endurance progress widget will display a countdown timer; and after the end date has passed, fundraisers will no longer be able to enter endurance activities, and any connected apps will no longer import activities.
14. Determine whether donors can make pledges of an amount per unit of activity completed for this challenge, to be charged at the end of the challenge.
    • Note: pledges will be charged at the challenge end date (see #12 above). If no end date is set on the challenge, donors will be required to enter an end date when they submit a pledge.
15. Click "Save"

Multiple Challenges

Administrators can configure multiple challenges on a single campaign or entity by clicking the "Add Challenge" button below the endurance challenge and following the above steps. For each endurance challenge, fundraisers will see an additional tab in their dashboard in which the can modify their goal and enter and manage activities. In some interfaces (for example, the circular progress bar widget on the homepage), the initial endurance challenge will be considered "Primary" for display purposes.

Supporting Interfaces

Once your challenge is configured, this challenge is displayed in the interface in various ways that you should know about. These include:

Site Widgets

• There is a widget available in Site Builder, called "Progress Bars - Advanced", that displays fundraising and endurance progress of a campaign side-by-side. It is recommended to enable this widget and disable the standard progress widget. If you don't see this widget in your Site Builder, please contact us to add it.
• Endurance progress widgets are added to every fundraising and team page on the campaign. Please note that by default these widgets don't show until the fundraiser (or a team member) logs endurance activity towards their goal.

Registration Flow

• A new default field is added to the Fundraiser role in Registration Builder. This field allows registrants to set their endurance goal amount. It can be configured to show or hide in Registration Builder. To learn more, click here.
• A similar field is added to the team creation form, which allows team captains to set their team's endurance goal amount during the team creation flow.

The Admin

• A new section is added to registrant and team records in the Admin to display their endurance goal and progress towards their goal.
• Administrators can create automated emails to be sent when various defined endurance milestones are reached.

Fundraiser Dashboard

• A new tab is added to the dashboard of every fundraiser, titled with the name of the challenge, where fundraisers can edit their goal, log activity, and view endurance pledges. Similarly, an endurance progress widget is added to the "My Team" tab for team captains.
• New items "Update Endurance Goal", "Log Endurance Activity", and "Connect Endurance Integration" are available in the Fundraiser Task List (under Fundraising > Task List).

Liquid

• Liquid related to Endurance Challenges and endurance goal objects are available on registration and goal reached email templates. Administrators can compose registration confirmation emails to include information about the challenge and the registrant's endurance goal amount, and include progress information on (fundraising) goal reached emails.
• Liquid related to the endurance pledges object is available on challenge- and pledge-related emails.

Permissions

Permissions for creating and managing Endurance Challenges is managed by the "Endurance Challenges" permission item within the Fundraising category. Details:

• Delete: Create, delete challenges, override parent configuration
• Edit: Update any challenge details
• View: Can access sub-tab and view challenge
• None: No access to sub-tab