How do I add and manage challenges?

Challenges are where all the good stuff takes place in your Dialogue. Participants will read the challenge details and then can submit their own ideas, and add comments to and rate other people's ideas.

This article talks you through the practical steps of adding and editing a challenge. If you want to know more about how to set up a really great challenge, then have a look at our Dialogue Success Guide too.

Adding a new challenge

From the administration menu, select 'Challenges' to take you to the 'Manage and Moderate Challenges' page:

Then choose the 'Add Challenge' button:

You'll be taken to the 'Add a challenge' page:

Here you can:

• Add a title for your challenge, and
• Choose how people will access your challenge. Challenges can be 'public', 'hidden' or 'restricted'. Read more about the different access levels.

Once you've filled in these details, select 'Create Challenge'. You'll be taken to the dashboard for your new challenge. You challenge will be in draft until you choose to publish it.

How to edit the details of your challenge

To edit your challenge's title and description, go to the Challenge Dashboard. You can get to a challenge's dashboard by selecting its title on the 'Manage and Moderate Challenges' page. On the dashboard, choose the 'Edit Challenge Details' option:

This will take you to the 'Edit Challenge Details' page. Here you can edit the challenge's title if you wish, and you can also enter a description and a summary.

• The title appears at the top of every page in both public and admin sides of the site, while you are looking at this challenge. If you make the title clear and easy to understand, it'll help people to get straight into submitting ideas.
• The description appears at the top of the challenge page, above the idea listing. It can contain formatted text, images, embedded videos and links. You need to enter some text here before you can publish the challenge.
• The summary is a shorter version of the description - ideally just a few words - which will appear underneath the challenge title when it's listed on the homepage. This is optional, but helps your respondents to get a feel for the challenge context.
• If you have opted to display the 'share via Twitter' link on your site, and your challenge is public, then you will also see a field for 'Default tweet content'. This is where you can enter things like hashtags or other text that you would like people to include when sharing links to ideas on Twitter.

Changing the access and participation settings for your challenge

From the challenge dashboard you can also change the access settings via the 'Change Access Settings' link, this allows you to change whether your challenge is Public, Hidden, or Restricted. More detail about the access settings can be found in this linked article.

You're also able to tailor how people can participate in your challenge and whether it is open or closed via the challenge dashboard. Head to 'Change Participation Settings' to set whether users can submit ideas, comments and ratings in Open challenges, or from here you can close the challenge entirely.

Publishing your challenge

When you've added all your content, set your access level, and changed any participation settings if you wanted to, you can Publish your challenge using the big green Publish button.

You can live edit your challenge using the three options on your dashboard without retracting it, but if you need to take it back into draft mode at any point then you can do so using the 'Retract' button. While in draft, nobody on the public side of the site can see or interact with the challenge.

Things to note and troubleshooting:

Challenges show on the homepage in the order they are added

Dialogue lists challenges in chronological order, with the most recently added at the top and the oldest at the bottom. If you have a few challenges to put in at once, be sure to think about the order you want them to show and put the one you want at the bottom in first and the one you want at the top in last.