Creating a Challenge
Challenges are a tool on Pacemaker that helps group of people organize around one or more goals over a specific period of time. A challenge leader creates a challenge page on Pacemaker, invites others to join and progress across all members are tracked together on the same page. Challenges can be helpful in motivating you and other to complete your goals, whether everyone has the same goal or not. More information about Pacemaker Challenges can be found on our website.
Challenge Basics
To create a challenge, visit the challenge creation page and specify your challenge settings. A challenge tracks group progress over a specific period of time so, as challenge leader, you first need to set up the name, tagline, start date and end date for your challenge. If you'd like signups to start before the official start of your group challenge, you may set that up as well. If you have a signup date, participants will be able to join your challenge but goals won't be tracked until the official challenge start date.
Participant Goal Settings
Once you've set up the basics, you can set up the kinds of goals participants can have within a challenge. Specifically, you can decide
- Does everyone have the same goal? Pick the "Overall Target setting to specify the exact goal everyone needs to have.
- Can everyone track their own goal? Choose the "Open" option
- Should everyone track their own goal but keep the unit of measurement the same? e.g. words, lines, tasks etc? Choose the "Open" option and specify how the goals should be measured
Group Goal Settings
You have three choices regarding overall group goals
- No group goals: use this option if all plans are tracked independently of a shared goal
- Dynamic Group Goal: use this option if the group goal is the sum of everyone's individual goals in any given day and overall
- Fixed Group Goal: Use this option if everyone is aiming to contribute towards one overall goal
Group Size Settings
Finally, pick the maximum amount of people who can be in your challenge and whether or not they can submit multiple goals.
Note that only Premium users can have challenges with up to 100 plans in them or have challenges that last more than one month. Please contact us for custom pricing if you need challenges with more than 100 participants.
Click "Save this Challenge".
Inviting Participants
Once you've created the challenge, you will get link to your challenge page. Email this link to your participants and ask them to join the challenge.
Each participant will need their own Pacemaker account to be able to create a plan that joins the challenge. Their plans will need to meet your challenge rules in order to be entered.
Note that all challenges are public, so participants must have public plans that meet the challenge criteria in order to participate.
Participating in the Challenge
Between the challenge start and end dates, Pacemaker will allow you to see how all participant plans are going and whether or not any group goals are met. If you'd like, you can also make use of the lightweight message board to comment on how everyone's plans are going. Here are a few examples of how group progress will be shown.
