Learn how to start your very own step challenge.
When creating your first step challenge there are a few key points to consider to get the most out of your employees and their time:
- How long should the challenge last?
- How many people will likely take part?
- Should we be working together or competing?
- What route should we walk?
In this post we'll discuss each of these in detail and hopefully help you get a better idea of the type of step challenge you are hoping to create for your teams.
How long should the challenge last?
At Big Team Challenge our pricing is broken into two tiers based on duration. Our first tier is any challenge lasting up to 6 weeks, and the second is any challenge lasting 7 to 12 weeks. How long you choose to run your challenge will largely depend on how motivated your teams are. If this is your first time running a step count challenge our recommendation is to make the most of the lower tier and run one for somewhere between 4 and 6 weeks. We've found that a minimum of 4 weeks helps build lasting change in users, and that after 6 weeks they start to drop off if they aren't fully engaged.
That's not to say that 7-12 week challenges aren't effective, in fact from what we've heard from our repeat customers it's quite the opposite. While a drop off can occur after 6 weeks, we've found this has been avoided when the challenge organisers are actively engaged in the challenge themselves and making use of incentives, or even simply keeping in touch with participants with the News Posts feature. It seems to be that if participants know that you are engaged in the competition they are too!
How many people will likely take part?
As tricky a question as 'how long is a piece of string?'. It can be really difficult to know exactly how many people will take part in your challenge but there are a few guidelines we can offer on this.
The first one is how big is your company? If you have 100 or less employees and you have a good relationship with them all you can expect anything from 50-75% participation. For larger companies, especially those in the thousands of employees, we would probably expect around 10-25% participation. It's not that these employees don't want to take part necessarily, it's just that these types of challenges can sometimes get lost in communication. When you have employee groups in different departments, locations, or even countries, it can be easy for some groups to simply miss out.
One way to achieve the highest possible levels of participation is to open the challenge up to registration as early as possible and give everyone time to discover it and get signed up. At Big Team Challenge we don't bill you for the registration period, so you might as well open it up 2 weeks or 2 months early! The longer you give your users to register and get ready, the better chance you'll have of capturing those stragglers!
Should we be working together or competing?
Is your challenge to foster some friendly competition between teams, or would you like everyone to be working towards a shared goal? Our step challenges have two challenge modes to choose from: Teams Vs Teams and One Big Challenge. Both modes require your users to get into teams (which you can set the sizes of), so you can still have the teams showing up in various leaderboards and encourage some friendly competition. However in Teams Vs Teams each team is individually collecting enough steps to move their own team along the virtual map that you've set for them, where as in One Big Challenge all teams are pooling their steps together to move everyone along the map at the same time.
Both modes can foster some friendly competition, while One Big Challenge might give you more freedom to work together and tackle a much larger map such as our Around The World routes.
What route should we walk?
What step challenge route works best for your specific situation will depend on what we've discussed above.
As a general rule we use the following formula to guess at what length of route you should be trying to tackle:
(Number of people per team) x (number of days in the challenge) x (10,000 steps).
Eg, we're running a teams vs teams challenge, for 42 days, and teams are set at a maximum of 5. So we would calculate (5)x(42)x(10,000) = 210,000. So we need a route that is 2,100,000 steps long (roughly 1500km / 930 miles).
We would then look at our library of routes to find one that matches. In this case we might choose Scotland: Heritage, Land and Culture as it's a close match and a fun route full of interesting milestones.
What if we're running a One Big Challenge and all the teams are collecting their steps together?
In this case you simply ignore the team sizes and swap it for the number of participants in the whole challenge. So for example we still have teams of 5, but there are 235 people taking part, we would use the following formula:
(235 people) x (42 days) x (10,000 steps) = 98,700,000 steps (68,000km / 43,000 miles).
As you can see, for One Big Challenge you require a much larger route to accommodate the number of people contributing to it. In this example we might suggest our Icons Of The World route as it is a good size and has a lot of milestones to keep your challenge interested and engaged.
If you ever need help, we're always here to answer your questions
At Big Team Challenge we pride ourselves on being there to help. Our team is made up of actual humans who are ready to help answer any questions you have and even chat over your ideas and help provide some guidance. So why not get in touch and start a conversation with one of our team today!