Challenges

Let's cover the basics.

Summary

We designed and created Clubs App to help incentive good habits through improving incentive alignment. We found that oftentimes, creating good and consistent habits is inspired by a single point of determination which quickly fizzles out - whether it be a commitment to go to the gym twice a week or practice the tuba every other night. Clubs create a penalty for failing to fulfill your prior commitments for a designated amount of time, which in turn provokes natural habit building and, subsequently, improvement. Clubs are designed with social proofing in mind. In order to succeed in personal goals, you can create and invite friends and family to join you in your shared pursuits. Within a club, members create challenges, which are opt-in programs where members commit membership fees to back their commitment to a goal.

Getting Started

You can get started with a challenge by either joining an existing challenge within a club that shares the same goals as you do or by creating your own challenge that can contain its own members, defining the mechanisms and rules yourself.

Joining a challenge

When you join a challenge, you agree to its goals, time parameters, proof rules, and commitment fees. Other members in the challenge, including the challenge's creator, are also held to these rules.

Once you've committed to a challenge, funds are withdrawn from your wallet. If the challenge has already begun, then you are beholden to its rules immediately. All proof requirements become enforced as soon as you've committed to the challenge.

Challenges can contain as many members as you like!

Creating a challenge

If you can't find a challenge that fits your goals, you can create your own. Many aspects of a challenge, like its name and join-by dates, are editable in after creation but before challenge start. If you change certain important aspects about a challenge, like the requirements or cost, then any existing members are required to sign off on the changes in order to stay active within the challenge.

Challenge creators are bound to the same rules as other members. The only difference between creators and members is the ability to arbitrate proof disputes - which we'll explain in more detail in the Challenge Disputes section.

Payouts

Challenges don't last forever - they have a defined start and end date. Funds are collected in their entirety at the moment of a member's challenge commitment. Once a challenge is completed, members who maintain their commitments successfully receive the sum of their commitment fees as well as a share of the funds forfeited by others in the challenge.

We calculate payouts based on a member's total completion of a challenge in combination with the completion rates of all other members in the challenge.

If, in a $100.00/member, 10-round challenge with 10 members, you complete 8 out of 10 rounds successfully, you will forfeit $20 dollars of your own commitment to the loss pool. Other members abide by this same rule - if one succeeds in only 4 rounds, they will forfeit $60 to the loss pool. The combined loss pool is, at the end of the challenge, redistributed according to the relative success rate of the individual members compared to the other members. In our example, if you succeeded in 8 rounds, while the other 9 members all succeeded in only 4 rounds each, the loss pool would contain $560. After the 10% Clubs fee, the remaining, splittable balance would be $504. Of this, you would receive ~18.2%, or $91.63. In total, you would receive $171.63. The other members receive ~9.1% of the total loss pool, or $45.81 plus their $40 successful commitment fee, resulting in a total returned amount of $85.81. Clubs would receive $56.00 in fees.

While increasing the amount you walk away with once a challenge completes is a nice perk, we think that the real goal should be the self-improvement made throughout the challenge's duration - not any funds secured by others dropping out. That's only our two-cents, though.

Seasons

After a challenge has concluded its duration, the challenge creator can elect to start a new challenge season. New challenge seasons, by default, inherit their previous properties. Aspects like cost, duration, and actions are all pre-populated and ready for initialization. However, challenge creators can also edit these attributes before starting a new challenge season. If a challenge was too difficult, expensive, or could be tuned to be more effective, you can make these changes in between seasons. Members who were a part of a previous season can re-join new seasons once they become available.

Challenge Disputes

Proofs are moderated by the members of a challenge. Any proof that is made into a challenge is visible to all of its own members, and any member can dispute the validity of a post within a round. Disputes can be made quickly and easily by members - incorrect actions, inappropriate behavior, or any other reason can be cited as basis for a dispute.

Once a threshold of disputes has been reached, the challenge moderator can remove the post from consideration in the round, requiring another post to be valid within the remaining time period. If enough posts are removed, the challenge creator can then disqualify a repeat offender entirely, making them ineligible for the rest of the challenge's season. Disqualified members forfeit all funds past and including the round of disqualification to the loss pool.

Disqualified members can report poor behavior for manual review by the Clubs team if they feel removal was maliciously used outside the bounds of the club.

Challenge Structure

What are the main components of a challenge? Challenges have properties that are set as they are created. These properties define what type of actions are required of the challenge's members in order to remain active and maintain their commitment fees.

Sponsorship

Challenges can be set to allow sponsorships on their creation. Sponsorable challenges are able to accept "sponsors", which add value to the challenge's total commitment pool. These sponsorships do not return to sponsors at the end of the challenge's duration and are instead split equally among participants that would otherwise receive a payment at the end of a challenge season. Because pool size for sponsored challenges is greater than the total club fee collected, this guarantees a net gain for all participants who successfully complete their requirements.

Sponsorable clubs do not require a minimum commitment fee.

Action Types

These are the types of actions someone can perform in order to stay involved with a challenge. An example for challenge action types can be both push-ups and sit-ups in a workout challenge. Either of these types of actions would constitute a qualified action for the club, and either can be selected once the challenge is started.

Round Duration

Round duration is the period of time in which a member can submit proof of an action. The three preset durations are daily, weekly, and monthly. If duration is set to, for example, daily, then members must submit proofs at least once per day. The quantity of proofs required is determined by the frequency, which is measured per-round. A challenge with a round duration of weekly and a frequency of 3 requires 3 actions to be recorded per week in order to stay active.

Clubs with more strict cadence requirements may seem favorable, but we think that the more successful clubs have consistent but reasonably achievable rules.

Proof Requirements

Challenge proof requirements are types of proofs that are acceptable to prove that a member performed a required action. The current supported proof types are:

• Photos

• Videos

• Geotags

• URLs

If a member records an action, they must also submit the required proof as well. For example, if a challenge requires push-ups or sit-ups to be performed 3 times per week with a proof type of photo, then a member must submit 3 actions all alongside a photo per week to stay involved with the challenge. If the proof types were set to both photo and geotag, then both and photo and location geotag proof must be submitted alongside each recorded action.

Proofs are visible to all other challenge members. If publicity is set to public, then proofs are visible to members within the challenge's parent club as well as within the challenge.

Commitment Fees

Commitment fees are the fees collected by the challenge from members at the time of a member's commitment. This amount is set at the outset of the challenge, like all other properties.

Commitment fees are pooled together as the challenge progresses. If a member does not meet the requirements of a challenge round, they forfeit the proportional fee for that round, becoming a part of the loss pool. These members can continue to contribute proofs as the challenge continues to recoup their commitment fee over time.

At the end of the challenge's duration, all collected funds are split among all challenge members according to their success rate.

Start Date

The challenge creator is able to set the start date as a future date from the time of challenge creation. Between the time a challenge creator creates a challenge and the start date, other parameters (like commitment costs, proof requirements, and the start date itself) may be changed.

If members have already joined an uninitiated challenge when these parameters are changed, those members are required to re-verify their participation.

Duration

Total challenge duration is measured as a number of rounds and is set at the inception of the challenge by the challenge creator. For example, if a challenge measures its rounds in weeks, then the challenge creator must select a challenge duration as a function of weeks as well - a 10-week-long challenge in this scenario would be acceptable, but a 100-day-long challenge would not.

Member Count Requirements

Challenge creators can specify an optional minimum and maximum amount of members allowed in their challenge. In the case where a challenge does not reach its minimum member count, the challenge will not start - requiring a renewed invitation and restart for existing members. In the case of a maximum being met, new members will be unable to join until others leave their challenge.

Join Policy

The challenge join policy specifies the way a member can join the challenge. Specifically, a challenge creator specifies who can invite other users to their challenge (or if an invite is necessary at all), as well as the final date a member can join by. If specified after the start date of a challenge, users can join partway though a challenge's duration.

If a member joins a challenge after its designated start date, the member is still obligated to pay the total commitment fee. Any previous rounds are forfeit in the payout calculations, acting as if they were failed. This is to dissuade late-joiners from taking disproportionate amounts of loss pool share without completing the requisite tasks.